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Old Leeds 



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ITS BYEGONES AND CELEBRITIES. 



OLD LEEDS CROPPER, 




LEEDS: 
H. W. WALKER, BRIGGATE. 

1868. 



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*- 



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V 



* 






THOMAS WRIGHT, ESQ., M.A., F.S.A., 

THIS BOOK IS 

DEDICATED, 

WITHOUT ANYBODY'S PERMISSION* 

IN HUMBLE RECOGNITION OF HIS INVALUABLE 

LABOUR TO ADD TO OUR KNOWLEDGE OP THE PAST, 



INTKODUCTOKY AND EXPLANATOBY, 

The living relic of an age which has become 
subject for history, having little sympathy with 
things done around me, but delighting in remin- 
iscences of my early days and in the records and 
traditions of days more ancient still, it is my 
desire to preserve the memory of things of old, 
in some danger of being neglected if not for- 
gotten. Not that much, if anything, is to be 
found in the pages following which may not be 
found elsewhere ; but facts recorded only in folios 
which few people read, or dispersed through many 
volumes whence fewer still care to collect them, 

B 



are practically lost to folks in general. And how 
much that we would gladly know is lost beyond 
retrieving from the common disregard of Thoresby's 
principle, — " that if no man write what every man 
knows, it must at last happen that none will know 
what none have ever written." 

Little did I once imagine that I, a Kadical, 
having imbibed the politics of a cropping-shop, 
and who shouted till I was hoarse for Milton 
in the great contest of 1807; little, I say, did I 
then anticipate living to be aggrieved at a too 
rapid progress, outstripping my wishes, my ideas 
and my affections. The destruction of Middle 
Kow and the Moot Hall was to me the rending 
of a link that joined the age to which I belonged 
to the one into which my life had extended. 
It has since required a struggle to control my 
feelings whenever I gazed upon the blank from 
Kirkgate end to Briggate top. Such was the effect 
of this great and long lasting trouble that I was 
unnaturally callous on the subsequent re-building 
of the Old Church ; though, inconsistently enough, I 
have ever felt spite at the gales of January, 1839, 
which blew Trinity spire so far from its perpendi- 



cular that it had to be taken down. And now I 
hear that our main street, instead of sensibly stop- 
ping at the Head Kow, is to be carried on and on 
until we may go on seeking the top of Briggate 
to Gates-head. Poor Queen Anne to be sent again 
upon her travels ! Cannot we even now afford 
peace to a Stuart ? The only consolation for me 
would be a second Eestoration — the restoration of 
Queen Anne to the ground over which she stood 
when in front of the Moot Hall. There she would 
henceforth mark that honoured site; there, an orna- 
ment and useful, she would help the aged to 
cross. Time has given her a possessory title to 
Briggate, why should she not command her own 
street, like William the Third at Hull? 

I verily believe that this one change would 
induce me to go and look: for be it know T n that 
I do not now go out. Once it was my delight 
to walk through the fields from the foot of Merry 
Boys' Hill to Woodhouse Moor, but the changes 
on that side put a stop long since to my walks 
westward. Soon, I fear, we shall have nothing but 
street all the way to Kirkstall Abbey. East and 
South, as well as West, has the country vanished, 



and North Town End is north town end no more. 
So later, my one stroll was through Lydgate into 
St. John's Church-yard; and at length even this 
has been denied me, without the endurance of some 
scene distasteful to my eyesight. Had any one 
really commenced pulling down St. John's, I fear 
that I might have ended my days in an asylum, 
having been acquitted, on the ground of insanity, 
from a charge of Wilful Murder. As it is, I can 
stay content at home, and persuade myself that 
Harrison's church, once called new but now grown 
venerable, has not come to harm. Or, rather, I 
should be content could I protect my ears as well 
as eyes. When my hostess brings in my dinner, 
talk she will ; and news of a new street, or of an 
old building demolished, comes as regularly as the 
salt. Her pet hobby is a remorseless railway which 
is to cut through all obstruction, chopping up my 
native town as if it were some unlucky shred 
between the blades of my own shears. And she 
has told me that the old Fleece is to come down. 
How often have I gazed at it from across Briggate 
— with the adjoining house, and the old spire of 
Trinity rising behind it, the most picturesque bit 



in Leeds — and marvelled that no painter had trans- 
ferred that scene to canvass. 'Tis a subject on 
which I dare no longer dwell; lest indignation at 
the thought of some new-fangled abomination rising 
upon the ruins of the old Fleece should choke me 
quite. My great resource is to forget, and to 
dream that things are as once I knew them. 
And sometimes my imagination travels back so far, 
that I fancy the sound of voices and of footsteps 
heard outside to come from the Leeds bowmen, 
going down hill to Butts Lane on their way to 
practice at the Park Butts. Butts Lane, I say; 
never do I use its new, unmeaning name of Basing- 
hall Street. 

Another solace has been the composition which 
I now venture to print. That none may question 
the authenticity of its relation, I have, so far as 
practicable, and at the risk of being additionally 
tedious, given my authorities for my several state- 
ments. Where none are specified in most cases I 
rely on Thoresby, and I have endeavoured, as much 
as might be, to let my authorities speak in their 
own words. But though none need therefore trouble 
themselves about my identity, in regard to their 



reliance upon my book, it would scarcely be cour- 
teous to my readers, if I be so fortunate as to 
have any, did I close this chapter without some 
slight outline of my history. 

According to a family tradition, my great-grand- 
father was the son of a Eoyalist, ruined by the 
civil war. Fortunately he, my great-grandfather, 
had a good, practical knowledge of the clothing 
trade, and sense enough to make the best of his 
fallen position. He commenced attending the market 
as a clothier before its removal from Leeds Bridge 



b^ 



to the lower end of Briggate. Combining shrewd- 
ness and talent for business with economical habits 
and much energy, he emerged from the condition 
of a clothier and became a merchant. On his death, 
his entire property fell to my grandfather, who also 
inherited much of his talent ; but unhappily not 
his prudence, or I might at this moment have 
ranked with a Blayds or a Denison. After many 
years success in business — during which he became 
possessed of a mansion in Kirkgate that I should 
be proud to point out if it still existed — he must 
needs embark in some colonial speculations; and 
instead of becoming a millionaire in no time, as I 



suppose that he intended to do, he lost all but a 
comparative remnant of the really large estate which 
he and his father had got together. The disappoint- 
ment of his too exalted hopes was too much for 
him. He died; and my father might have lived 
comfortably, but undertaking to retrieve our losses 
he eventually lost what remained to us. He, too, 
sunk under his misfortunes, left his affairs on the 
verge of bankruptcy, and my mother to face the 
world as best she could, with me, a child. Selling 
all, she left the Kirkgate mansion and retired, 
with the pittance which remained after paying my 
father's creditors, to a small rural cottage near 
Lawyer Buck's Well. 

Here we had lived some time, when having one 
day run out during the preparation of my matutinal 
porridge, a man approached me bearing on his 
shoulders an immense pair of shears. Terror struck, 
I ran shrieking into the house, much to my mother's 
amusement when she had ascertained the cause. 
Becoming re-assured during her few minutes friendly 
chat with the man, I ventured up to him also. 
We became friends. Once he took me to his 
cropping-shop to see the big shears at work, and 



ultimately I grew ambitious myself to control so 
gigantic an instrument. My mother consented, not 
knowing what better to do ; for in our humble and 
somewhat remote dwelling we were forgotten by 
our old acquaintance, and my mother had no near 
relatives of her own. She was an orphan who, 
w T hen my father married her, was in the unenviable 
position of companion to an old lady with a long 
purse and a short temper. The crusty dowager, 
annoyed at being left, though a husband was the 
consideration, never saw my mother more. And 
thus I became a cropper. 

Innocent of many attainments which I am told are 
now necessary for a gentlewoman, my mother made 
our little home comfortable. She was a capital 
cook, an accomplished needlewoman, and she under- 
stood English. All these qualities I hold in grateful 
remembrance. She supplied my wants, bodily and 
mental. She was my one companion. None had 
more enjoyment than I when, in an evening, I 
listened to her stories of those days which were 
indeed to her the good old time ; when she knew 
no want, and lived, socially, in a station which she 
was well qualified to fill. She well remembered 



the seven years' war, and would tell how, when 
here, as elsewhere, folks were mad with vexation 
at Admiral Byng's desertion of Minorca, the effigy 
of the unlucky Admiral was taken in procession to 
a lofty iron gibbet, where it was hung first and 
burned afterwards, amid general applause. Then, 
again, she would recount the glories of the memor- 
. able Bishop Blaise pageant, specially held on the 
24th of January, 1758, in honour of the 46th 
birthday of Frederick the Great. Our ally had then 
triumphed at Eosbach and Leuthen, and great was 
his popularity. A wool-comber in royal robes per- 
sonified the great Prussian King, and never had so 
magnificent a Bishop Blaise procession been known 
in Leeds before. But I dare say all this, and 
more, may be found in the news-sheet of the time, 
and I must come to an end or my chapter won t. 
Almost the only thing of value which my mother 
preserved was my grandfather's copy of the Ducatus; 
and to this and her well-remembered stories, it has 
been my delight to add every scrap of information 
about my native town on which I could lay hold. 
But for this, I doubt that I should ever have risen 
from the state of apathy into w T hich I fell when 



10 



left in the world alone. But for this, my remaining 
life would have been a blank indeed. As it was, 
I lost all ambition ; but I saved as much from my 
wages as purchased the annuity of forty odd pounds 
a-year which now supports me in my humble 
lodging. It is no great income, but it has been 
honestly won ; and, independent, I contemplate with 
satisfaction the shears which hang over my chimney- 
piece, at rest but not rusty. They may hereafter 
find a home at the Museum of our Philosophical 
Institution. 

Nevertheless it is not without some trepidation 
that I now print my book, which, if unfortunate, may 
take from me some small but accustomed luxuries 
for the rest of my life. To publish I am resolved, 
at least it can do no harm to any but myself, and I 
trust to the public for some patronage and for 
charitable criticism. Old-fashioned I am, as the 
cut of my coat testifies, not to mention my nether- 
clothing ; but I am neither envious nor misan- 
thropical, and my peculiarities are accounted for by 
the incidents of my life. So I encourage myself to 
hope that this my story of Leeds byegones and 



11 

celebrities, may meet with a sufficiently favourable 
reception to gladden the remaining days of a well- 
nigh worn-out cropper. 

JEEEMIAH ODMAK 



Merry Boys' Hill, February, 1868. 



II. 



" Ledis, 2 miles lower than Christal Abbay on Aire Kyver, is apraty 
Market, having one Paroche Chirche, reasonably welle buildid, and 
as large as Bradeford but not so quik as it. The town stondith most 
by clothing." John Leland. 

It was on the 12th of July, 1536, that Leland, 
the Librarian of Henry the Eighth, got leave to 
commit his rectory of Poppeling, in Calais marches, 
to the care of a curate, and to start upon his travels 
under a commission which the King had granted 
him three years before. He was empowered to 
enter and search the libraries of all cathedrals, 
abbies, priories colleges and all other places wherein 
records, writings and whatever else were lodged 
relating to antiquity. And it must have been 
within four years from the above that he entered in 
his Itinerary the note at the head of my chapter, 
his head-quarters being in Kirkstall Abbey; for by 
the end of 1540 the Abbey had shared the fate 
of similar institutions and surrendered to the Crown. 



13 



Notwithstanding his " not so quik," I decline ad- 
mitting that Leeds was then in any degree less 
important than Bradford, though I will not discuss 
the point. With grave misgivings as to the pro- 
priety of my indulgence in this publication of 
venerable gossip, I raise for it no claim to the 
dignity of local history, and it is not my wish to 
dispute with anybody. 

Going back to the time of the Doomsday Inquest, 
1080 to 1086, I will set out with an assertion not 
likely to be contradicted. Leeds, with its ten acres 
of meadow, its church, priest, and mill of four 
shillings' annual value, and a population whose 
extent, wealth and pursuits are indicated by their 
recorded possession of fourteen ploughs, was not 
then what Leeds is now. Perhaps, though, I am 
not so secure from contradiction as I have as- 
sumed ; for Leeds was then an improving place, 
and according to some people's notion of improve- 
ment, it is so still. Its manorial value in the 
reign of Edward the Confessor was only esti- 
mated at six pounds a-year, and at the time 
of the Great Inquest it was declared seven ; while 
Bradford, in King Edward's time worth but four 



14 

pounds yearly, had not improved anything, so that 
in Doomsday Book we have a good set off against 
Leland's indefinite "not so quik." Yet the Leeds 
public in the reign of William the Conqueror 
doubtless thought with regret of the Saxon times. 
Would not the very " villains " inwardly resent their 
transfer from Saxon to Norman domination, and see 
in Ilbert de Laci and his sub-tenant, Ealph Paganel, 
a new cause for grumbling ? All would feel it to be 
an injustice and degradation when, in the second 
year of the second Norman King, the said Ealph, 
restoring the ruined Priory of Holy Trinity at York 
to subject it to the French Abbey of St. Martin's, 
Marmonstier, Tours, subjected the Church of St. 
Peter at Leeds to the Benedictines of Holy Trinity. 
The Pope confirmed the transaction, and Jeremiah 
Odman will not sit in judgment upon it; but 
when the French Abbot appointed the Prior of 
Trinity, and the Prior of Trinity chose a parson for 
Leeds, at the same time abstracting the greater 
portion of the revenue appertaining to our Church 
of St. Peter, I see reason for thinking that Leeds 
folk were dissatisfied with the arrangement. It 
may be that "Radulphus, Paganellus cognomina- 



15 

tus," as his classical conveyancer would have us 
believe, had heard how Moses set up the Tabernacle, 
how David projected and Solomon built the Temple, 
and how the sanctuary was restored in the days of 
the Maccabees, and that he was therewith prompted 
to undertake our double subjection, being inflamed 
by the fire of divine love and ambitious of treasure 
in heaven. But recollecting that it would make no 
difference to Ealph Paganel whether the parson of 
Leeds or the Prior of Trinity had our ecclesiastical 
revenues; and that, as a result his donation, our 
rectorial tithes pass away from us to Christ's Church, 
Oxford, some of us, even now, may be disposed to 
sympathize with our predecessors of the 11th century 
if they regarded with not over charitable feeling the 
charity of their immediate lord. Whether to the 
satisfaction of Leeds or not, it continued under the 
Paganels ; though Eobert the son of Ilbert de Laci 
bringing trouble on his family, by taking part with 
the Conqueror's eldest son against Henry the First, 
the superior lordship went for a time into other 
hands. To the Paganels Leeds most likely owed 
the erection of its castle, of which the former 
existence and situation is known to us with a 



16 

certainty downright tantalizing, insomuch that we 
know nothing more about it. Our castle may have 
been built before the reign of Stephen, in which 
castles sprung up and disappeared again like so 
many mushrooms; but it was not the Leeds castle 
which Bang Stephen took in 1139, though Thoresby 
and others after him have said it was. That was 
the castle of Leeds in Kent, which, with the castles 
of Dover and Bristol, Henry the First had given 
to his natural son, Stephen's great antagonist, the 
Earl of Gloucester. The charter of Maurice Paganel, 
hereinafter spoken of, was " given at Leeds," and it 
may have been in his castle that Paganel signed it. 
Hardyng's statement that Eichard the Second was 
sent to Leeds by Henry the Fourth, his supplantor, 
" there to be kepte surely in privitee," makes one 
think that there would be a castle here to keep him 
in. But our actual knowledge of it is obtained 
from a document in the Eecord Office of the time 
of Edward the Third, which speaks of a Fulling 
Mill near the Castle. A trench which has been 
taken for the castle moat has more than once come 
to light during excavations near the west end of Boar 
Lane, but any other trace has so completely passed 



17 

away that the hill on which our Castle stood is not 
named from it but from the neighbouring mill. 
Yet street, lane, row, place and square commemo- 
rate the more fortunate park. The conjecture that 
the building of the Castle caused a sensation in 
Leeds is nevertheless a safe one ; and when — the 
Lacies having regained the royal favour and part 
of Ilbert's great barony — Kirkstall Abbey arose 
under the auspices of Henry, son of Eobert the 
unlucky, a new topic for conversation was furnished 
to Leeds folk concurrently with the accession of 
Henry the Second. Beside the Abbey remains 
which constitute his great monument, there is a 
link between Henry de Laci and our own times 
in the double crosses upon the buildings which 
enjoy the liberty of Temple-Newsam. By him 
was confirmed the gift of "Whitkirk and JSTewsam 
by William de Vilers to the Knights-Templar. 
" I have done this," said Henry de Laci, " for 
my soul's health, and for the souls of my father 
and of my mother, and of all my friends living 
as well as dead, that life everlasting may be given 
to us all." Let not his sincerity be questioned. 
We know nothing of Henry de Laci — in great 
c 



18 



favour with Henry the Second and his mother 
Empress Matilda — to render any stretch of charity 
needful for the concession that in his munificence 
his piety was sincere. Besides, the exemption of the 
double-crossed houses from soke liabilities, long 
before their redemption in 1839, operates with 
directly opposite effect to the loss of our tithes by 
Ealph Paganel. Then, there are the ruins at Kirk- 
stall. What would Leeds be with ten Town Halls 
and no Kirkstall Abbey ? Within its walls were laid 
the remains of its Founder, and of his son Eobert, 
the last of the race, and peace be with them. 

In 1186, three years before the death of Henry 
the Second, that king had more bishopricks vacant 
than he found it easy to fill up ; among 
others, the bishoprick of Carlisle. And while in 
that city, says Eoger de Hoveden — that is of 
Howden, so that he was a Yorkshireman and 
worthy of credit — King Henry "caused Paulinus 
of Leeds to be elected to the bishoprick of Carlisle ; 
which, however, the said Paulinus declined. On 
this, in order that Paulinus might be willing to 
accept of that bishoprick, the King offered to 
enrich it with revenues to the amount of three 



19 



hundred marks yearly, arising from the church 
of Bamborough, the church of Scarborough, the 
chapelry of Tickhill and two of the King's manors 
near Carlisle." There was, then, a Leeds man 
whom King Henry the Second thought so fit for 
a bishop that King Henry tried to bribe him 
into becoming one. Do any ask why Paulinus, 
like King Stephen's siege, may not belong to 
another Leeds? Let any other Leeds establish a 
better title to him and I'll give Paulinus up; until 
then, I claim him for our own. Let any sceptic 
look into the Ducatus, and read of Paulin-flats 
as near as Knowsthorp. So called, says Thoresby, 
" not from Paulinus the Archbishop of York, but 
Paulinus de Leedes, of Maurice Painel's charter/' 
This Paulinus might be another member of the 
family, or the Bishop-elect himself. Whether he 
scrupled to accept preferment from the opponent of 
Thomas a Becket, or he had no wish for a diocese 
exposed to Scottish visitation, as Carlisle cathedral 
had then good cause to know; and whether he held 
out or in the end gave way, I cannot tell. Eoger 
says no more about him. Instead of Paulinus, 
Hugo de Bello Loco is placed third in the list of 



20 

Carlisle's Bishops ; but lie was not consecrated 
until the 24th of January, 1218, so there is a long 
blank to account for in some way. 

Let me hasten to that red-letter day in the calendar 
of my native town, the morning of St. Martin, the 
11th of November, 1207; when Maurice Paganel 
followed the example set by Eoger De Laci, at 
Pomfret, and did, by charter with his seal affixed 
that it might "remain ratified and uninfringed to 
posterity," confirm to his burgesses of Leeds and 
their heirs the rights and privileges in the charter set 
forth. Besides liberty and free burgage, each bur- 
gess had secured to him his homestead, with a half 
acre of arable land, on the reasonable condition of 
freely, peaceably and honourably paying sixteen 
pence every Whitsuntide and Martinmas to Maurice 
Paganel and his heirs. Saving his lord's superiority, 
the burgess might sell, or, if generously disposed, give 
his landed possession, the transfer being effected by 
surrender and re-grant, as in the case of copyhold 
property at this day. The purchaser was to pay a 
penny to the lord's agent, whom the Latin charter 
dubs a praetor. By paying to him annually the sum 
of fourpence, any burgess possessing more than one 



21 



house might be a landlord himself; but so great a 
man as the praetor must not be spoken of incident- 
ally only. His municipal reign was from Whitsun- 
tide to Whitsuntide again. His right to office was 
indisputable, for it had to be bought and paid for ; 
but the burgesses were secure against any stranger 
praetor, unless an outsider outbid the highest offer 
which any burgess made. At the same price the bur- 
gess had the preference, and what in reason could he 
ask for more ? Had Maurice Paganel engaged not on 
any consideration to admit a stranger, his interests 
might have suffered by collusion among the bur- 
gesses ; on the other hand it is possible that some- 
times outside bids might be other than bond fide. 
On the expiration of his year of office the praetor had 
to account for the lord's rent received by him ; but 
he was more than mere rent-collector for Maurice 
Paganel and his successors. He had judicial func- 
tions. Only " for the pleasure of the Crown" were 
the burgesses of Leeds to go out of the borough on 
account of any plea or complaint against them. In 
other cases, the burgess charged with an offence was 
to be tried before the praetor, by '''twelve lawful men;" 
and if any one in the praetor's service were the ac- 



22 



cusor he must produce a witness or the burgess could 
not be called upon to answer. If charged with " the 
shedding of blood," the accused had to find seven 
compurgators to join with him in swearing that he 
was innocent. Charged with a less serious breach of 
the peace, three compurgators were sufficient; but 
twelve were required when a burgess was the accusor. 
Nothing is said of hanging as a punishment, ominous 
as is the name Gallow Hill. Heavy penalty was 
imposed for non-payment of lord's rent, five shillings 
being added to every farthing left unpaid ; and lar- 
ceny was treated more seriously than bloodshed. 
" If any burgess," said Maurice Paganel in his char- 
ter, " be impleaded of larceny from another, we will 
judge him in our borough with the help of the lord's 
servant, he making one compurgation for the first 
offence with thirty six compurgators." If thus im- 
pleaded a second time, an appeal to arms or an ordeal 
by water was the only defence allowed to him. Oh ! 
that some thirteenth century man had left us a 
sketch, how rude soever, showing how Leeds folk 
fought to prove that they were not thieves; or how 
one of us was occasionally thrown into water to 
see whether innocence would keep his head above- 



23 

board, or the weight of his guilt sink him. Then, too, 
we might have had depicted the sort of shop which a 
burgess was allowed to erect upon his land in order to 
make up lord's rent. Whatever the shops were like, 
certain it is that commerce flourished in our town, 
and an Aire navigation was not unknown. " It shall 
be lawful,'' declares the charter, " for all burgesses to 
convey grain, by land or by water, wheresoever they 
may think proper; and all other merchandise, without 
toll or bar, unless they are forbidden by the lord or 
his bailiffs." Moreover, no toll was to be paid on 
account of any woman "to be sold for slavery" — an 
early instance of free-trade legislation which ought 
not to be overlooked. Maurice Paganel released his 
burgesses from all toll and custom throughout the 
whole of his lands belonging to the borough; but, 
said he, "the burgesses aforesaid, shall continue to 
bake in my oven as they have been accustomed;" 
and centuries later there stood near the upper end of 
Kirkgate, with the prison for neighbour, the common 
bakehouse having a soke annexed to it. There are 
some details of the charter which I have passed over. 
It is not light reading; and they who desire its 
further acquaintance have it already published both 



24 

in Latin and in English. It is dated in the ninth 
year of the coronation of King John, regnal years 
being then computed from the sovereign's coronation, 
not, as now, from the death of his predecessor. All 
honour to Maurice Paganel for granting Leeds this 
charter; to its very witnesses, Adam de Eeinville 
Ivone de Lindenses, Wilmot de Stapelton, Adam de 
Beiston, Hugo de Swillingtoh and William Pic- 
taviculus. I cannot find the name of Paulinus 
de Leedes which Thoresby mentions as in the 
charter; and as neither Dr. Whitaker nor Mr. 
Wardell would intentionally omit it, I conclude 
that Thoresby knew some copy unknown to them, 
or to Jeremiah Odman. But one name there is 
which does honour to our town, the name of 
Eadulph de Leeds, who wrote the charter, "and 
many other charters." Who can deny Leeds a high 
place in the annals of literature, when so long since 
as the year 1207 she had a son who could write 
charters ? Could I but assert that, eight years later, 
he wrote Magna Charta, what glory would be ours ! 

Maurice Paganel deserves a statue, though there 
might be difficulty in procuring an authentic likeness, 
and political troubles soon ended our connexion with 



25 

the family. In Stapleton's history of Trinity Priory, 
it is told how "in 1217 Maurice de Gaunt, who had 
been taken prisoner at the battle called the Fair of 
Lincoln, ceded the manors of Leeds and Bingley to 
Kanmilph, Earl of Chester and Lincoln, as the price 
of his ransom." But, as the poetical Eobert of Glou- 
cester sings : — 

" Randulph, the noble Erie of Chester, deide suththe (after) al so 
As in tuelf hondred zer of grace, and thretti and to." 

The husband of the second of Earl Eanulph's 
four sisters and co-heiresses, Hugh de Albinei, Earl of 
Arundel, succeeded him ; but he too died, leaving no 
progeny, and we then returned to the Lacies, that is, 
to a new family who represented the old one, 
and preserved the name. John de Lacy, descended 
from the widow of Kirkstall Abbey's founder by a 
second husband, married Margaret, Earl Eanulph's 
niece ; and by this marriage he not only acquired for 
his family the Earldom of Lincoln, but greater hon- 
our still, the lordship of the manor of Leeds. 

With the loss of the Paganels we did not also lose 
the Prior and Convent of Holy Trinity. In the year 
1242, no one less than Archbishop Walter de Grey, 
who built the oldest portion of the present Minster 



26 



at York, judicially assigned to Holy Trinity Priory 
and to Leeds vicarage each its respective share of the 
parochial tithes and altarage, in order to end " great 
contention thereabout." We learn from his award 
that our parish church was then endowed with glebe 
land as well as tithes; and that in place of the 
one mill of Doomsday Book, Leeds, in the reign 
of Henry the Third, had mills belonging to the 
Earls of Lincoln, and other mills beside. It was by 
the same Archbishop Walter who settled our 
tithe dispute that four thousand marks were ex- 
pended in munificent hospitality at the Christmas of 
1252, when Henry the Third's daughter Margaret 
married, at York, Alexander the Third of Scotland. 
At the first course alone of one of the Archbishop's 
dinners sixty fat oxen were served up; and I dare say 
there were Leeds folk among the guests, Vicar John 
de Faversham for one. And I am equally confident 
that some Leeds folk had a share in causing the royal 
nuptials to be celebrated, the day after Christmas 
day, "early in the morning, secretly and before it 
was expected, because the multitude of people rushed 
and pressed together in an unruly manner in order 
to be present and behold the grandeur of such mar- 
riage." So sayeth Matthew Paris. 



27 

Another marriage in which Leeds, as it proved, had 
an interest, caused discontent instead of rejoicing. 
John de Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, died in 1240. His 
heir and only son, Edmund, who was then a minor, 
was never Earl of Lincoln, for his mother through 
whom the title came, outlived him. Yet Edmund de 
Lacy was a youth of excellent prospects, and while a 
minor and ward of the Crown he was furnished 
with a wife by King Henry the Third's unpopu- 
lar consort, Eleanor of Provence. The bride, Alice, 
daughter of an Italian marquis, was a near relative 
of the Queen; and the match added to the odium 
which Eleanor had incurred by making provision for 
her foreign connexions. To this marriage Edmund 
de Lacy doubtless owed, in some measure, the court 
favour which procured for him, in 1251, a grant of Free 
Warren for his manor of Leeds, and other manors, 
thus becoming entitled to hunt the game thereon. 
Seven years afterward he died, leaving a son, Henry, 
who on the death of his grandmother became Earl of 
Lincoln. The manor of Leeds passed to Edmund's 
widow, the fortunate Alice, who out-lived both her 
husband and son. For Henry, Earl of Lincoln, died 
in 1310, and in the following year his mother quit- 



28 

claimed to tlie Prior and Convent of Holy Trinity 
whatever interest she had in the advowson of St. 
Peter's at Leeds. She also confirmed a grant of 
Aberford Mills to one John Sampson, and Thoresby 
had the deed in his collection. In the Inquest of 
Yorkshire and other counties which was taken after 
the manner of Doomsday Book, from 1284 to 1290, 
by a Commission, at whose head was John de 
Kirkby, treasurer of King Edward the First, the 
Earl of Lincoln is said to hold directly under the 
Crown the fourth part of a Knight's Fee in Leeds. 
For this he was assessed at ten shillings in an 
"aid" to the said King. Eoger, of North Hall, 
Leeds, w T as also assessed at five shillings for the 
eighth part of a Fee, which he held as sub-tenant, 
not "in chief." The remainder of this Fee seems 
to have been held by the Abbot of Kirkstall 
and John Scott of Calverley. Another of our 
great men of the day is also mentioned in the In- 
quest, Alexander de Leedes, who held one carucate, 
or the sixteenth of a Fee, at Gipton. Nor should I 
pass over the name of Hugo de Swillington, beyond 
reasonable doubt a descendant from the Hugo de 
Swillington who helped to witness Paganel's charter. 



29 

A broken statue of Henry, Earl of Lincoln, may 

still be seen above the gateway of his ruined castle 

at Denbigh, where his son, Edmund, was drowned 

in the castle well. If it be true that another son, 

named John, was killed by falling from the turrets 

of Pomfret Castle, the accident at Denbigh must 

have been a second; for Speed calls Edmund an 

only son, and says that the Earl of Lincoln, in his 

l 
distress, stopped the completion of the castle. His 

daughter Margaret also died before him; but in 

1292 his daughter and heiress Alice was married, 

in her tenth year, to Thomas Plantagenet, Earl of 

Lancaster and nephew of King Edward the Eirst, 

aged eleven. And by this marriage the manor of 

Leeds passed to the House of Lancaster. Earl 

Thomas cannot have held it long. As I have said, 

the Earl of Lincoln's mother was still our Lady 

of the Manor in 1311, and in 1321 Earl Thomas 

was beheaded at Pomfret as a traitor. But in a 

return entitled Names of Towns, made in 1315 or 

1316, "Ledys" with its adjuncts is assigned to 

Thomas, Earl of Lancaster. Much scandal was 

reported of his wife, the heiress Alice. Whether 

it were true or false, she was not too disconsolate 



30 

a widow to marry again ; but the manor did not go 
with her. 

The attainder passed against Earl Thomas, after 
his execution, was reversed, on the accession of 
Edward the Third, in favour of the Earl's brother, 
Henry. He left a son of the same name ; but this 
second Henry, Earl of Derby and afterward Duke 
of Lancaster, died in 1361 of a plague then raging, 
and he left no male heir. His daughter Blanche 
had a few years before married John of Gaunt, and 
thus that renowned son of Edward the Third became 
Duke of Lancaster and Lord of the Manor of Leeds. 
He is said to have killed in hunting the last wolf 
known in our neighbourhood, a notable addition to 
his fame. He died in February, 1399. In Septem- 
ber following his son became King Henry the 
Fourth of England ; and, with the other possessions 
of the Duchy of Lancaster, the manor of Leeds 
passed to the Crown. 

Did Henry the Fourth, by sending Eichard the 
Second to Leeds after his deposition, enable us to 
boast of a royal visit during the Middle Ages? It 
is our only ground of claim to that honour. Kings 
often travelled through Yorkshire on their way to 



31 

and from Scotland or the Scottish Border; but they 
made for York, and at most came no nearer than 
Pomfret, while sometimes the shrine of St. John 
at Beverley led royalty still further astray. As 
royalty had not the discernment to come here, it 
is the more likely that Leeds folk went from home 
to see royalty, as many would, about the 21st of 
August, 1328, when Edward the Third married 
Philippa of Hainault at York. The revels lasted 
three weeks, and had the wedding been at Leeds 
I would have told more about them. It is sin- 
gular that the one King said to have taken special 
notice of us is Eichard the Second, who in the end 
was brought here a prisoner. Thoresby states that 
John Snagtall, who on the 12th of June, 1394, 
became our vicar, owed the appointment to the 
said King. It is not very probable that the Prior 
of Holy Trinity had suffered his right of presenta- 
tion to lapse by delay in using it; but a word in 
favour of John Snagtall from Eichard the Second 
|0 whom York is indebted for its Lord Mayor, 
could scarcely fail to decide the choice of the Prior 
and Convent. Only five years previously the 
Bang had established another claim to the grati- 



32 

tude of York, by settling disputes between the 
civil and ecclesiastical authorities. Snagtall was 
still our vicar when King Eichard was in captivity 
at Leeds, and surely he was mindful enough of 
former favours to attempt to visit his fallen bene- 
factor. To do more than attempt might be beyond 
his power, as Eichard was "to be kepte surely in 
previtee" Let not anyone dare to suggest that 
Leeds was chosen for the purpose as an out-of-way 
sort of place. 

Leeds appears generally to have been out of 
the way of the Scots, but in this it was fortunate. 
When the news came how Scarborough, Northaller- 
ton, Eichmond, Beverley, Boroughbridge, Eipon, or 
Skipton had been handled, or how the Scotch 
invaders were encamped before the very gates of 
York, I dare say that Leeds was content to be 
overlooked and to help to fight the Scots at a 
distance. For in his charter, Maurice Paganel did 
not forget to stipulate, — "And when our Lord the 
King shall demand aid of the cities of England, 
my burgesses of Leeds aforesaid shall give unto my 
lord the King reasonable assistance/' And from 
the 11th of April, 1291, when Edward the First 



33 



issued his summons at " Derlington " to the Sheriff 
of Yorkshire and others (Henry, Earl of Lincoln, 
signing it with other attesting nobles), and called 
on all who owed the King service to meet him at 
Norham; from this date, I say, downward, Leeds 
doubtless made repeated contributions to Scots- 
opposing armies. The occasion when our town itself 
is least likely to have got off Scot free was in 
1322, when Bruce had defeated Edward the Second 
at Byland Abbey, near Malton, and a party of 
Scots wintered so near to us as Morley. The East 
Eiding suffered chiefly; but if none in Leeds were 
hurt, at least somebody was frightened, and I wish 
that I could say who buried those coins of Edward 
the First and Edward the Second which were 
subsequently found on digging a Kirkgate sewer 
near Thoresby's house. Of course they found their 
way to his museum. Where are they now ? Their 
hider perhaps regretted that his beheaded lord of 
the manor, Thomas of Lancaster, was not living, 
and just then maintaining his alleged treasonable 
understanding with Eobert Bruce. 

The Parish Church was at this time — as it has 
been supposed from the evidence of certain frag- 

D 



34 



ments, found when our latest " Old Church " was 
pulled down — a Norman building which had super- 
seded the still older church of Doomsday Book. 
Nothing is known of the circumstances under which 
the Norman church was first encroached upon by 
the Old Church of our own days, of which the 
oldest part, the nave, referred us by its architectural 
characteristics to the time of Edward the Third. At 
this very period, the list of vicars given by Thoresby 
bears token of incompleteness, so that I cannot so 
much as give with any certainty the name of the 
vicar under whom the church known to us was 
commenced. But as there are no facts to enlighten, 
neither are there any to trouble me, and I can 
speculate at will. The supposition that the Norman 
church had, in the aforesaid year, 1322, suffered 
from a Scotch visitation, and required repair or re- 
building, is admissible but needless. I will therefore 
suppose only that Leeds out-grew its Church ac- 
commodation ; that after the Parliament held at 
York, on the 1st of March, 1328, in the second 
year of King Edward the Third — in which Parlia- 
ment Bruce was acknowledged King of Scotland 
=— the danger of any more Scotch visitations was 



35 



thought to have passed off; that the impetus 
given in this reign to commerce and manufactures, 
especially of cloth, helped on the building of the 
new nave — indeed in the forty-seventh year of 
King Edward, the fulling mill near the Castle, 
with nine acres of land, produced no less a yearly 
rental than £1 13s. 4d. ; and lastly, I will suppose 
that the nave was finished before John Snagtall 
became our vicar. When he died in 1408, Eobert 
Passelew, apparently a Leeds man, succeeded him. 
Perhaps a Passelew had subscribed towards the 
church building, and the Prior of Trinity had the 
grace to acknowledge it by making this appoint- 
ment. There certainly was a Leeds family of the 
name, with property in the parish ; but of how they 
came by it, or came here themselves, I know no 
more than I know when they disappeared. In 
Matthew of Westminster's account of Henry the 
Third's reign the name of Eobert Passelew occurs 
repeatedly, from the year 1233 to 1253; and this 
Eobert may have been an ancestor of our Leeds 
vicar. 

If the history of our town were to be written 

in vicariates, that of Thomas Clarell, w r hich com- 

ft 



36 



menced on the 8th of March, 1430, would have an 
important place. Between him and Eobert Passelew 
we had four vicars in quick succession, the last 
of whom resigned and went to the church at Kellam ; 
but Thomas Clarell remained Vicar of Leeds forty 
years, and then he died. That he took great interest 
in his church is beyond question. He adorned it with 
new pictures. He founded there a chantry, at the 
altar of St. Katherine, virgin and martyr. But the 
grand event which signalized his vicariate was the 
donation of William Scott, senr., of Potternewton ; 
who at that suburb, on the 10th February, 1454, did 
give, concede and by deed confirm to Eobert Nevile, 
Esq., Thomas Clarell, Vicar of Leeds, John Elcock 
and John Douse, chaplains, "unum Messuagium & 
unum Garclinum" thenceforth known as Vicar's 
Croft. The boundary on the north is specified as a 
burgage, that on the east as a tenement, belonging 
to William Passlew; on the south, as the King's 
street called Kyrkgate, and on the west as a King's 
highway unnamed — but soon called Vicar Lane. 
The deed was witnessed by Sir John Langton, Brian 
of Beeston, John Hopton, Esq., William Passlew, 
John Kylynbeck, and many others. From this ever 



37 

memorable incident of Vicar ClarelTs vicariate I 
turn with comparative indifference to the War of 
the Eoses, which took place in his time also. Leeds 
itself was never the scene of conflict, but some stir- 
ring events came to pass in the neighbourhood. It 
would require all the attraction in Vicar Clarell's 
new pictures, if they had then appeared, to draw 
Leeds folk to church on Christmas Day, 1460 ; for 
news must then have arrived of the fight the day 
before, between Sandal Castle and Wakefield, in 
which Eichard, Duke of York, was slain. And as 
in later times some of us have been led to York 
by the attraction of a hanging, before, among other 
improvements, we got hangings at home, it may fairly 
be supposed that Vicar Clarell had parishioners who 
went to York to see the head of the said Eichard, 
derisively ornamented with a paper crown, and stuck 
over Micklegate Bar. And there would be some excite- 
ment in Leeds when the son of the said Eichard, who 
on the 4th of March following became King Edward 
the Fourth, arrived at Pomfret with the great Earl of 
Warwick and 50,000 men, to oppose the still larger 
force with which Margaret of Anjou strove to re- 
trieve the downcast fortunes of the House of Lan- 



38 

caster. How we should discuss the repulse of the 
Yorkists, under Lord Fitzwalter, at Ferrybridge, by 
the Lancastrians under Lord Clifford. Then the 
crossing of the Aire at Castleford by the Yorkists 
under Lord Falconbridge, and the defeat of Clifford, 
who was himself killed in the fight. And when 
Good Friday came on the 3rd of April, 1461, Leeds 
could not possibly have got over the Battle of Tow- 
ton, fought near Tadcaster on the previous Sunday, 
and fatal to the Lancastrian cause. We should be as 
unfit for church as on the Christmas day after Wake- 
field fight, forgetting Vicars Croft itself in our talk 
of the battle and its results ; and of the many " on 
sad Palm Sunday slain, that Towton Field we call," 
as said in Drayton's Polyolbion. Can any doubt that 
some relic of this battle was to be found in the 
museum of Thoresby ? That collector of " auld nick- 
nackets" entered in his catalogue "a stirrup of very 
odd form, and so strait as to admit only part of the 
foot. It was lost by one of the ancient family of 
Vavassours in crossing the Eiver Cock, then dis- 
coloured with blood, at the battle of Towton." 

Nine years afterward, on the 1st of March, 1470, 
died Vicar Clarell. The removal of the Communion 



39 

Table when the Old Church was pulled down, in 
1838, revealed his grave-stone, with inscribed brass 
plate, of which Thoresby told. 

Among the host of noblemen and knights slain at 
Towton was Sir Ealph Evre. His brother, William 
Evre, Bachelor of Divinity, succeeded Thomas Clarell 
as Vicar of Leeds. Following up the munificence of his 
predecessor Vicar Evre founded the Chantry of St Mary 
Magdalen, which, or the house appertaining to it, 
stood at the corner round which we pass from Brig- 
gate into Upperhead Eow. If, as Thoresby thought, 
it was a building of " some magnificence/' a cropper's 
malediction upon its destroyer ! In 1482 William 
Evre resigned the vicariate, which he perhaps found 
incompatible with his precentorship at York Minster. 
His successor was a Scotch prelate, John, Bishop of 
Eoss, whom political troubles had driven south of the 
Tweed. The first years of his vicariate saw the War 
of the Eoses ended. In the year after he became 
Vicar, Edward the Fourth died ; then came the short 
reigns of Edward the Fifth and Eichard the Third ; 
and on the 22nd of August, 1485, the battle of Bos- 
worth gave the crown to ~King Henry the Seventh, 
the first of the Tudors. John of Eoss held the Vicar- 



40 

age of Leeds until 1499, when he is supposed to have 
returned to Scotland. Our next vicar was Martyn 
Collins ; but he only stayed here a year, becoming 
Chanter, Canon Eesidentiary and afterward Treasurer 
of York Cathedral. Eobert Wranwash followed, and 
he remained Vicar of Leeds until his death in 1508. 
Then we had a second William Evre, grandson of Sir 
Ealph who fell at Towton, and uncle of William, the 
first Lord Evre, whom Henry the Eighth made peer. 
How long he remained our vicar I know not ; but it 
was probably in some way owing to his Leeds ap- 
pointment that his uncle, John Evre, a younger son of 
Sir Ealph, was buried here in 1524. The Eeformation 
drew near though little expected by the monks at Kirk- 
stall, who had recently raised a tower upon their 
Abbey and gloried in a new east window. Old things 
passed away like our old Norman Church, and the 
second William Evers — for even the spelling of sur- 
names changed — was the last vicar of note whom we 
received from the Prior of Holy Trinity. 



II. 



" John Harrysonn of Paudmyre had a child christened, 16 Aug, 
named John. ; '— Parish Church Register, a.d, 1579. 



If "the ever famous John Harrison/' as Thoresby 
calls him whose christening is thus recorded, had, 
like Thoresby, left us a diary, and prefaced it with 
what he heard, or might have heard, from Leeds 
folk who were old when he was young, his good 
deeds would have been one more than they are. 
Then, we should have had a contemporaneous 
account of doings at Leeds during the Eeformation 
of the 16th and the Eebellion of the 17th cen- 
turies. But this was an omission from the bene- 
factions of John Harrison; or, if he left us so 
precious a legacy, it stopped short of its destination. 
Little I know, much am I left to imagine, about 
my native town in those eventful times. Harrison's 
manuscript entitled " The Government of the town 



42 

of Leeds before it was made a Corporation" may 
have given some light upon the subject; but 
although it figured as an 8vo., No. 260, in the 
catalogue of Thoresby's collection, it has no place 
whatsoever in the catalogue of Jeremiah Odinan's. 
And Ealph Thoresby himself could not so much as 
say with certainty that Paudmire, otherwise the top 
of Briggate, was mire no longer when Harrison was 
born. Anxious to show that Leeds had then 
advanced in civilization as far as paving stones, he 
could only plead that Paudmire had been so called 
after, indisputably, it was paved; and, as if conscious 
that his argument was inconclusive, he then went to 
Canterbury for an excuse, in case of need, for non- 
pavement. That very ancient city, he declared, was 
acknowledged to have been unpaved about a hundred 
years earlier. More to the point would it have been 
had he cited the bequest of one Thomas Waid, in 
1530, of all his tenements in the Head Eow, of his 
own burgage-house and one adjoining it, for the 
maintenance of highways leading to Leeds ; and the 
purchase by the town, in the very year of John 
Harrison's birth, of two houses at Pitfall with their 
appurtenances, for a similar good purpose. Here's 



43 

evidence incontestable that Leeds folk in the 16th 
century took heed to their ways. 

The surmise that Leeds houses were then of timber 
has more support than has the pavement of Paud- 
mire. Eed Hall is said to be the first brick-built 
house in the town, so those built before it must have 
been of stone or timber. The more ancient Hall of 
the Eockleys was, we know, of timber, as doubtless 
others of less importance. Tor in Leland we read 
that the greater portion of the Charter-House at 
Hull "was buildid with Brike, as the Eesidew of 
the Buildings of Hulle for the most part be;" that 
" the hole Toune of Dancaster is buildid of Wodde, 
and the Houses be slatid : yet is there great plentj?" 
of stone thereabout ;" and under the head Wakefield, 
that "the building of the Towne is meately faire, 
most of Tymbre but sum of Stone." Yet of Leeds 
he says not anything but that it was "reasonably 
welle-buildid," wherefore I conclude there was not 
anything more to be said; the houses, though 
respectable, being old-fashioned and of wood, and 
Leland seeing no cause for surprise thereat as he did 
at Doncaster. We have confirmatory evidence in 
the old houses of St. John's place, which have only 



44 



a brick facing over the original wooden structure. 
Finally, there was Austrope Hall, Holbeck, con- 
cerning which Dr. Whitaker said in a note to the 
Ducatus published in 1816, — "One wing of this 
mansion, probably the last of the old timber houses 
in the town, was pulled down about fifteen years 
ago." 

What matters the material ? Timber Leeds 
flourished. Thoresby, when relating Bishop Ton- 
stall's address to King Henry the Eighth, at 
Haslewood, in 1541, talks of "the cloathing trade, 
which was then inconsiderable;" but he meant in 
comparison with what it afterward became, and he 
spoke of the district generally. Though compara- 
tively inconsiderable it were, Leeds had a good share 
of it, notwithstanding John Leland's foolish "not 
so quik." Else, why did William, a younger son 
of Eichard Sykes, of Sykes Dyke, near Carlisle, 
(whose servants wore the branded bull as a badge) 
choose Leeds when, as Thoresby tells us, he " came 
into these more populous and trading parts, where 
he improved himself considerably in the clothing 
trade ? " The wisdom of the choice is evident, for 
his son Eichard, who married in 1561, had a son 



45 

of the same name who became a Leeds Alderman, 
Leland testifies to the migration of cloth-making 
from a more northerly town, — " There hath bene 
hard by the farther Eipe of Skelle a great Numbre 
of Tainters for "Woollen Clothes wont to be made 
on the Town of Eipon ; but now idlenes is sore 
encresid in the Town, and clothe makeing almost 
decayed." The distinction which he draws between 
Leeds and the neighbouring towns in which cloth- 
making had settled, is this, — "Wakefield stondith 
by Course Drapery ; " and again, "It stondith al by 
Clothyng;" Bradford "standith much by Clothing;" 
Leeds "stondith most by Clothing." That is, as 
I interpret it, Leeds, unlike Wakefield, was not 
dependent on the cloth trade only, but had more 
of it than the other town. " As large as Bradeford" 
quoth Leland ; I should think it was ! 

" Not so quik " indeed ! The records of the Duchy 
Court of Lancaster tell another tale. A most con- 
vincing proof of the prosperity of Leeds at this period 
is the extent of its litigation. From the thirty- 
second year of King Henry the Eighth — when 
John Spenser, claiming exemption from tolls as an 
inhabitant of Leeds, brought his action against 



46 

William Twhayts, of Barnsley Baillie, for illegal 
seizure of goods — to the close of the century, Leeds 
waged war against fair and market tolls throughout 
the kingdom. John Spenser was quickly followed by 
a Kollynbeck, who, along with others, fought a like 
battle against the Mayor, Brethren and Inhabitants 
of York city. In the fourth year of King Edward 
the Sixth, Thomas Marten, of Leeds, resisted the 
seizure of cloth which he had sold, by Sir Eobert 
Bradlyng, Kt., and other Aldermen of Newcastle ; and 
another Leeds man, Henry Coldale, had a contest 
with the Bailiff of Newark. In the twenty-first of 
Elizabeth, the year in which John Harrison first saw 
daylight, William Caldecote and other Leeds men 
asserted their right of exemption from tolls " through- 
out England," against the bailiffs of Hull and 
Beverley. Eowland Eastborne afterward raised the 
the same claim ; and in the thirty-sixth of Elizabeth 
he headed his townsmen against one Edward More, 
of Lancaster, and claimed a free passage over Colne 
Bridge. The year after, Henry Moxon and Balph 
Wade had a trial with Eobert Tubbe, Deputy of the 
Countess of Eutland, who demanded tolls for passing 
and re-passing through Eutland town and Wapentake. 



47 

.And the year after that there was another trial, in 
which James Mylnes of Leeds was plaintiff, against 
the Mayor, Commonalty and Citizens of London, 
and John Eussell. Besides these there were other 
and kindred cases, Leeds against Otley, Borough- 
bridge, Bradford and repeatedly against Eipon ; and 
one against Doncaster, in the forty-first of Elizabeth, 
in which exemption was claimed from payment on 
packing wool. 

Doth all this law work denote a slow town ? And 
the testimony of the Duchy Court to the quickness 
of Leeds men is not yet exhausted. They objected to 
tolls at home as well as abroad and gave trouble 
thereby to the Crown Bailiff. Thomas Thompson? 
who in this capacity served King Henry the Eighth, 
in 1533 or 1534 had a toll trial with William 
Baynes and other tenants of the Manor. Fourteen 
years later, his successor, Henry Ambler, main- 
tained the interests of Edward the Sixth against 
John Harryson and James Kyttson, of Pottar- 
newton and Worteley, whom he charged with 
breach of custom by non-payment of the Kings 
toll on corn and wooL In the same reign he 
brought an action against Bichard Blades, for tres- 



48 



pass on the King's right of toll, stallage, piccage 
and profits of stalls, booths and standings within the 
markets and fairs in Leeds. Then, John Cooper 
disputed his toll claims on wool ; and in this case 
Henry Ambler is described as King's Bailiff of 
Pumfret Honor and Ledes Manor. He continued 
in office under Queen Mary, and he showed strict 
impartiality in serving Protestant and Eoman Catho- 
lic Sovereigns. For having brought his action for 
tolls on corn and wool in the first year of King 
Edward, he brought an action for tolls on wool 
and corn in the first year of Mary. His office 
devolved on George Ambler, probably his son, who 
so late as the fortieth year of Queen Elizabeth, 
1597-8, had to invoke the Duchy Court to stay pro- 
ceedings before the Lord President and Council of 
the North, which had been taken by two inhabitants 
of Leeds, William Baynton and Alexander Eobinson, 
enemies of the tolls. This was not the first occasion 
of Bailiff George Ambler's appearance in Court. 
Six years before he stood forth in defence of the 
common bakehouse. Some Leeds men, whose names 
may for me rest in oblivion, had set at nought 
that venerable institution, ungratefully disregarding 



49 



Maurice Paganers injunction : — " bake in my oven." 
The oven triumphed. In the same reign it was 
farmed by John Metcalf at £12 a year; in the next, 
£120 was declared to be its yearly value. But after 
this, none need be surprised to hear that the farmer 
of the King's Mills had an uneasy time. In the 3rd 
and 4th of Philip and Mary, Laurence Lindley, of 
Leathley, then farmer of the Mills, alleged hin- 
drance to suit and soke against Thomas Fowkyng- 
ham, doubtless him of North Hall. Then there was 
seventeen years' peace ; for the next case was in the 
sixteenth of Elizabeth, when John Lyndley demanded 
suit, soke and mulcture from Thomas Cranmer and 
Agnes Whalley, mill owners, Kyrstall Abbey and 
Busshingthrop. He brought a second action in the 
same year, for breach of injunction, against Thomas 
Cranmer, Eichard Fisher and others, inhabitants of 
Leeds. "Who was this Thomas Cranmer ? Not the 
Archbishop of Canterbury, for he had been burnt in 
Queen Mary's reign. Yet it is said that, on the 
Dissolution, Kirkstall Abbey was granted in exchange 
to Archbishop Thomas Cranmer — a notable coinci- 
dence in locality and name. After another appeal to 
the Court, John Lindley parted with his troublesome 



50 



tenancy. In the twenty-second of Elizabeth, 
Christopher Boyse and William Morryese demanded 
their right as farmers of the mills. Yet in his retire- 
ment John Lindley could not have peace. He had 
a contest with Thomas Falkingham, the old opponent 
of his father, Lawrence, about some mills and a mill 
dam on " Shipcarbecke Kiver." Perhaps in despair 
of getting free from litigation, he took the Queen's 
Mills once more; and from the twenty-fifth to the 
thirty-ninth of Elizabeth's reign he often sought the 
aid of the Duchy Court to enforce suit and soke. 
Two years more and the fight was renewed by 
William Lindley, the inheritor of a father's and a 
grandfather's rights and troubles. 

Lawsuits of a private nature further prove that 
Leeds was very " quik" indeed. Lands and a mill on 
Eyre Water were the subject of dispute in the reign 
of Henry the Eighth ; cottages, lands and tenements 
in that of Edward the Sixth; Peter Banks and 
William Dyneley quarreled about the possession of a 
mill in that of Philip and Mary ; and in Elizabeth's 
reign there was a newly-erected fulling mill, there 
were tenter steads or tenter places, and miscellaneous 
lands, tenements and rights of way, about which 



51 



certain Leeds people thought it necessary to appeal 
to the Court of the Duchy of Lancaster. They who 
desire particulars may consult the Bills, Answers, 
Depositions and Surveys which form its Pleadings t 
Therein they may read of places known still by a 
modern version of the names which they bore three 
hundred years since — as "Lyttell Woodhouse," and, 
fit name for a law-suit, "Quarrel Hill;" and of 
others now forgotten — Leeds Wroys, Aplegarth and 
Margetholmes, the waste ground called Lady Flatte 
and King's Balke, and "The Marsh " at Woodhouse- 
in-the-Fields. In these lawsuits Thomas Talking- 
ham bore a prominent part. Sprung from a family 
in Lincolnshire, he had married Jane, daughter of 
Thomas Pigot, of North Hall, Leeds, and widow 
of Sir Giles Hussey. Through her, Falkingham 
came to the property for which he went to law ; 
but I suppose him to have done battle for the public 
as well as for himself. He was defendant in a 
case of destruction of fences in The Marsh afore- 
mentioned, which looks much like the assertion 
of a right of way; and there is another of his 
lawsuits which makes me wish that he were still 
alive. In Queen Mary's reign he prayed "for a 



52 

commission as to the stream and course of water 
of a mill, upon Nbrthalbecke brook, and if the same 
were a nuisance to Leeds Manor." Couldn't I find 
work for him now ! "Who now dare belaud our 
river as Drayton did two centuries and a half since, 
telling how the Aire 

" By Skipton down doth scud, 
And leading thence to Leeds, that delicatest flood 
Takes Calder coming in by Wakefield." 

But on the 15th of June, 1593, Thomas Falkingham 
was left in quiet at our church of St. Peter. To end 
this long story of our litigation under the Tudors, 
there were some disputes which evidently arose out 
of the Eeformation. In the first of Mary, William 
Barnby of Leeds disputed a title to lands and tene- 
ments connected with Farnley Chapel; in the 
seventeenth of Elizabeth there was contested a pur- 
chase from the Abbot of Kirkstall; and in the 
thirty-third of her reign there was a trial concerning 
lands relating to St. Mary's Chantry, Leeds Church. 

Lacking the manuscript which John Harrison 
ought to have bequeathed to us, we are left to 
imagine what passed in Leeds during the several 
stages of the Eeformation. Doubtless Leeds had 



53 



more parties than one ; and when on the 24th of 
July, 1533, the door of our parish church, like 
others, bore the King's instruction that thenceforth 
his Queen was to be styled Princess Dowager, 
unquestionably we had keen discussions upon 
the rights and wrongs of Catherine of Arragon. 
The subsequent posting of the King s " provocation" 
to a General Council must have given new impulse 
to excitement, and higher still would it arise the 
following spring, when, if King Henry's order were 
obeyed, our Vicar preached weekly on the Pope's 
usurpation. Then came October, 1536, when there 
sprung up the insurrection known as the " Pilgrim- 
age of Grace; 5 ' when Lord D'Arcy of Temple- 
Newsome secured Pomfret Castle until joined there 
by Eobert Aske, head of the movement. I know not 
that Leeds favoured Aske as York did; but the 
Bailiff of Leeds, perhaps the very Thomas Thompson 
who a short time before had striven to enforce 
the King's toll, was one of the leaders of the revolt. 
Its failure, its attempted renewal, and the hanging 
of Aske at York were closely followed by the 
memorable first of August, 1537, Feast of St. Peter 
ad Vincula, when the choir of our St. Peter's was 



54 



furnished with Miles Coverdale's Bible for public 
use — if, again, the King's order were obeyed. Thus, 
events enough had happened to interest Leeds in 
the great change going on, when its attention was 
directly summoned by the surrender to the Crown 
of Holy Trinity Priory, the appropriator of Leeds 
tithes and the nominator of Leeds Vicars from the 
days of Ealph Paganel. This surrender took place on 
the 11th of December, 1538. That of Kirkstall Abbey 
soon followed, but there is a question as to the year. 
The deed of surrender, given by Dugdale from the 
original possessed by Thoresby, is dated the 22nd of 
November, in the thirty-first year of King Henry the 
Eighth, and in the year of our Lord, 1540. But the 
22nd of November, thirty-first Henry the Eighth, is 
in 1539 ; so I choose to say with Thoresby in his last 
publication, the Vicaria, that Kirkstall Abbey sur- 
rendered the year after Holy Trinity. Agreeing 
further with Thoresby in that " I love not to dwell 
upon sores," I enter not into discussion upon the 
charges brought by Drs. Legh and Leyton against 
the inmates of these monastic institutions, though 
certain to have caused, at the time, discussion in 
Leeds. But I imagine that a damp was cast upon 



55 



the ardour of some who favoured these enforced 
surrenders, fondly hoping that our parish would 
regain Paganel's donation to Holy Trinity, when they 
found that King Henry had granted the advowson of 
Leeds vicarage to one Thomas Culpepper. Here 
again is a question as to the date of the grant, the 
15th of October, in the thirtieth year of King Henry 
— the surrender of Trinity Priory being on the 1 1th of 
December in the same year. Thus, the grant to 
Culpepper seems to anticipate the surrender ; yet, in 
the deed, the advowson is said to have been formerly 
in the possession of the late monastery of Holy 
Trinity. I leave others to settle the difficulty, what- 
ever the year the act is the same; and in the thirty- 
eighth of his reign King Henry gave the remainder 
of Ealph Paganel's alienation, the rectorial tithes, to 
the newly founded Christ's Church, Oxford. Christ's 
Church still has them, but the advowson eventually 
got home. The son of Thomas Culpepper, Alexander, 
who lived in Kent, sold it to Eowlancl Cowick of 
London. I know not whether the sale were before 
or after the appointment of Christopher Bradley to 
the vicarage, in the reign of Philip and Mary, the 
former vicar, John Thornton having resigned ; N but 



56 



Kowland Cowick had not long to wait for a vacancy. 
On the 22nd of August, 1559, the first year of Eliza- 
beth, he gave Alexander Fawcet the vicarage, Bradley 
having died. Four years afterward Cowick sold his 
right to Thomas Preston, citizen and draper, of 
London, who held it six years to no purpose — Vicar 
Fawcet lived on — and then sold it again to another 
Londoner, Edmund Darnellye, citizen and Haber- 
dasher. Him, as hereinafter to be related, we have 
cause to respect. 

As Leeds had less to do with the possessions of 
Kirkstall, I will speak of the portion only that 
enriched Ealph Thoresby's museum. There, were 
to be seen Kirkstall's stone salt-cellar with its eight 
triangular salts around the stem, and a hollow at 
the top for a silver one ; the Abbot's cast iron stirrup, 
seven inches broad at the sole; above all his drinking 
glass, nearly a foot deep and nine inches round, with 
its waved stripes of white enamel. There, too, from 
the Abbey, were a brass seal-ring and an iron pix ; 
and, as supposed, an altar-piece, thirteen inches by 
nine, with eight alabaster figures, parcel gilt, repre- 
senting the entombment of the Saviour by Joseph of 
Arimathea. Another of Thoresby's treasures was 



57 



significant of those troubled times, for it was found 
concealed "in a double-bottom ark" near a Leeds 
Chantry. Most valued by the hider, we may well 
believe, was a manuscript treatise " Of the Werldes 
unstabilnes and maners of Men yat yere in is," with 
a further dissertation on Death, Purgatory, Dooms- 
day, the "tokyns yet before sail come" and the pains 
of Hell. With it was a priest's habit, adorned with 
St. Peter and two others "delicately wrought in silver 
and silk of divers colours." But part only of this 
became Thoresby's ; for, as he explains, part fell into 
the hands of one who " burnt it merely for the silver's 
sake, though she had too much before." The dis- 
mantled Abbey of Kirkstall met with treatment as 
irreverent and utilitarian as this habit of a priest. 
Not left to peaceful ruin beneath the hand of time, it 
served to some extent as a quarry for the neighbour- 
hood. This we learn from " The Boke of Accompts 
maide and begun by the Churchwardens of the Towne 
and Parish of Leeds in the yere of our Lorde God 
1583." Therein they made record of the economy of 
their administration in the building of "greice," or 
stairs, on the west side of Leeds Bridge in that said 
year; informing posterity that the workmen's, wages 



58 

were 6d. a-day, and that the stones used were brought 
from " Christall Abbey." Thoresby had this account- 
book also, as well as the first Leeds register of Births, 
Weddings and Burials, old as the reign of Henry the 
Eighth. With these, in the now lost museum, were 
the Letters Patent whereby the said King Henry 
made peer Sir William Evers, nephew of the 
second Leeds vicar of that name. Why should not 
Leeds take interest in the ennobling of a family so 
associated with the town ? When Lord Evers' son, 
the brave Sir Ealph, with the aid of a few servants 
only held Scarbro' Castle against Eobert Aske, Leeds 
folk cannot have heard of it without remembering 
his relationship to their late vicar. Nor, again, could 
they be indifferent to the news of his fall at Ancrum 
Moor, in Scotland, fighting against the father-in-law 
of Lord D'Arcy's successor at Temple-Newsome. For 
be it known that this Sir Balph, who was a Lord of 
Parliament, is the " Keen Lord Evers" of Sir Walter 
Scott's Eve of St. John, and the " Lord Ewrie" of an 
old Border ballad which Scott has preserved ; and that 
after the beheading of Lord D'Arcy, 20th of June, 
1538, Henry the Eighth granted Temple-Newsome to 
the Earl of Lennox, whose wife was the daughter of 



59 



Earl Angus the victor at Ancrum Moor. She was 
also the niece of King Henry ; and, as well-known, 
at Temple-Newsome she bore her son Lord Darnle}\ 
in 1541. Many Leeds folk living at the time would 
be living still, when in January, 1569, scarce two 
years after Lord Darnley's murder, the captive Queen 
of Scots passed through Wetherby and Pomfret on 
her way to Sheffield Castle. 

Coincident with the Eeformation, very likely in 
some measure owing to it yet apparently the work 
of a Eoman Catholic, was the commencement of our 
Grammar School. A return of the ecclesiastical 
revenues of Leeds about the time when monasteries 
were put down contains the name of William Sheffield, 
as the priest officiating at St. Catherine's Chantry, 
founded by Vicar Clarell in the century before. A 
manuscript quoted by Thoresby also tells that Sir 
William Sheffield was appointed to the Chantry by 
the trustee of the foundation, Sir John Neville, Kt., of 
Liversedge. And in the sixth year of King Edward 
the Sixth, otherwise, 1552, or the beginning of 1553, 
"Syr William Sheaffield/' Priest, made a will by 
which he vested in Sir John Neville, Kt., and others, 
two copyhold closes of eight acres and a rood near 



60 



" Sliipscar Bridge/ 7 one close of a rood in measure- 
ment leading thereto, and several houses in the Vicar 
Lane. The trust thus created was " for finding and 
sustentation of one honest, substantial, learned man, 
to be a schoole maister, to teach and instruct freely 
for ever all such young scholars, youths and children 
as shall come and resort to him from time to time, 
to be taught, instructed and informed in such a school 
house as shall be founded, erected and builded by 
the Paryshioners of the said town and Parish of 
Leedes." It may well have been that the great change 
in which chantries as well as monasteries came to an 
end aroused Sir William's apprehension for the future, 
and led him to make this provision for educating 
Leeds in time to come. With what feelings other 
than apprehension he viewed the change we can 
only guess. Attached to the Church of Eome by 
old association, yet evidently a sensible and generous 
man, my own guess is that he saw much on both 
sides to disapprove of. In 1555, Sir William Erm- 
stead, chaplain to Queen Mary, gave lands and tene- 
ments at Wyke of four marks yearly value, toward 
the maintenance of a priest learned enough to teach 
a Grammar School in Leeds. And Leeds folk did 



61 



the duty assigned to them by Sir William Sheffield. 
They did not erect a school house, but what they did 
would perhaps have pleased Sir William more, had 
he but known it. In 1558 they purchased for their 
Grammar School a building called New Chapel, the 
site of which became the Pinfold of a later genera- 
tion ; and as they purchased from the Crown there is 
good reason to accept Thoresby's conjecture that New 
Chapel was a surrendered chantry. Dedicated to 
" Our Lady," said Thoresby, whence Lady Lane ; but 
the vulgar, his contemporaries, traced that name to 
Lady Hussey, of the neighbouring North Hall. 

Thus it was when Harrison was born. Three years 
before, a new revolt in the northern counties, under 
the Earls of Northumberland and Westmoreland, had 
been suppressed. The Eeformed Church was at 
length established; though Mary, Queen of Scots, 
still lived a captive, at Sheffield Castle, the hope of 
plotters against Church and State. Leeds had in 
Alexander Eawcet a Protestant for Vicar, who re- 
nounced the Pope's authority and acknowledged 
Queen Elizabeth's supremacy when her Commis- 
sioners, on Cowick's presentation, admitted him to 
the vicarage. In the next reign he was said to have 



62 

become old, blind and unable to discharge his duty ; 
but this was in a Bill of Complaint to the Court of 
Chancery, and complaints to a court of any kind 
don't often understate the case. Old and blind he may 
have grown, he may have been unable to officiate 
when Harrison was christened ; but I doubt that he 
was altogether so incapable and useless as, from the 
said Bill, we might suppose. The Churchwardens' 
account-book already mentioned has the following 
entry in 1583: — "Two thousand and a hallf of 
Breades to serve the Parish withal, 8s. 4d. Item, for 
Wyne to the same Purpose, £5 16s. 6d." This ex- 
penditure for the sacramental bread and wine, when 
labourers were paid with 6d. daily, denotes a number 
of communicants scarcely credible were Vicar Fawcet 
quite a dummy. At least he must have had the 
wit to keep a good curate. And Leeds had successors 
in training against the time when the old Vicar at 
length should die. Eobert, the son of William Cooke, 
of Beeston, was in his thirtieth year at the time 
of Harrison's birth, a Fellow at Brasenose College, 
Oxford, a Master of Arts and in Holy Orders. His 
younger brother, Alexander, was at the same time a 
scholar at the Grammar School which Sir William 



63 

Sheffield founded, and close upon fifteen; for he 
was born some four months after Shakespere, in 1564. 
John Harrison was but seven years old when the 
Queen of Scots was beheaded ; but the talk which it 
caused — especially at Leeds, so near Lord Darnley's 
birth place — was most likely remembered by him in 
after life. Still more the commotion of the following 
year — the year of the Armada. Staunch Protestants 
as Leeds folk had then become, I doubt not that the 
Queen's appeal for contributions towards a ship of war 
against the King of Spain was cheerfully responded to; 
none dreaming of a stir about it like that which after- 
ward made Hampden famous. The inscription upon 
one of our old church bells, "God save His Chiirche," 
may have had its origin in the apprehension caused 
by the Armada, or in the triumph at its destruction ; 
for the inscription is dated the same year, though, 
why I know not, the figures are reversed — 8851. 
And who knows but the Spanish King's attack 
on this stronghold of the Protestant religion, may 
have aroused that energy amongst us which secured 
for Leeds the advowson of its vicarage. Anyhow, it 
was at this time that Leeds folk "did frequently 
meet and consult of some convenient means, how," 



64 

after the death of Alexander Fawcet, " they might 
be furnished with honest, learned and able Ministers 
to succeed in the said vicarage." They applied to 
Oliver Darnley, who asked £150 for the advowson. 
But Henry, Earl of Huntingdon, Lord President of 
the North and Lord Lieutenant of this and other 
northern counties, took up for Leeds. His mediation 
brought the price down £20, Oliver Darnley being 
made acquainted with "the Godly design of the 
Parishioners, and being well affected thereto." Hon- 
our, then, to the Earl of Huntingdon, who, not content 
with this good deed, next year " sent certaine Boukes 
to the Schoulmaister, to be taught in the Schoule at 
Leedes," as the churchwardens' account book testified. 
Honour to Oliver Darnley, who, when he abated £20 
knew as well as other folk that Vicar Pawcet was 
an aged man. And honour to Vicar Pawcet, who, 
good old man, did not long keep Leeds from the 
exercise of its new power. For, saith the Parish 
Eegister,— " Sir Alexander Faucett, Vicar of Leedes, 
dyed upon Setterdaye, the 7th of February, 1589, 
betwixt the hours of eight and nine of the clock 
before noon, and was buryed upon Sunday, the 8th of 
February, 1589, before noon." 



65 



Leeds soon made choice of Eobert Cooke, who 
thereupon gave up his Fellowship to be our vicar. 
Before he quitted Oxford he had been chosen Proctor, 
and he had become Bachelor of Divinity. He had 
become, also, says Anthony Wood, " the most noted 
disputant of his time." The choice for vicar of one 
thus reputed, tells plainly that Leeds folk were then 
staunch Protestants, as I have said. A scholar and 
a native — for this alone he made a vicar for the 
parish to be proud of; but I suspect it was the "noted 
disputant" the Protestant champion, more than 
either native or scholar, who was made vicar of 
Leeds. Leeds had no cause to repent the choice. 
After his life was ended, Eobert Cooke was spoken of 
in a Chancery decree as "a famous and learned man;" 
and Thoresby declares him to have been "a singular 
blessing, not only to the Neighbourhood where he 
was born, but also to the Nation and even to the 
learned world in general." His vicariate corres- 
ponds with the bright period in England's history 
which lies between the final triumph of the Eefor- 
mation and the troubles that culminated in the 
execution of Charles the First. Yet even the course 
of Eobert Cooke was not altogether a smooth one. 

F 



66 

Before long he was involved in a tithe dispute with 
Christ's Church, Oxford, as his predecessors had been 
with the Prior of Holy Trinity. And as, in the 
13th century, Walter Grey, Archbishop of York, 
had settled the matter, so did Archbishop Matthew 
Hutton again take it in hand in 1596. His award 
was similar to Archbishop Grey's. 

The close of the century was marked by an act of 
grace, concerning our neighbourhood, by Queen 
Elizabeth. On the 4th of June, 1599, she granted to 
John, Lord D'Arcy, grandson of him who lost his 
life and lands for his part in the Pilgrimage of Grace, 
the parks of Eothwell and Eoundhay. For these ? 
which the former Lord D'Arcy had from the Crown, 
in reward for services against the Moors in Spain, 
had not been given with the other forfeited lands to 
the Earl of Lennox. Not four years afterward, on 
the 24th of March, 1603, died Queen Elizabeth, and 
that Earl's grandson reigned in her stead. 

As James the First passed from his old capital, 
Edinburgh, to his new one, London, he stayed in 
York from Saturday, the 16th of April, until the 
following Monday, duly attending service at the 
Minster on the Sunday between. But he then went 



on his way, as other Kings had done before, with- 
out making the slight divergence that would have 
brought him to Leeds, and have enabled him to visit 
his father's birth-place; his own property, too, as 
heir-at-law. He had business on hand of more im- 
portance, and I must admit that his father's memory 
was not entitled to the highest reverence. It was 
not long before King James parted altogether with 
Temple-Newsome, granting it to his Kinsman, Esme 
Stuart, Duke of Lennox, who soon after sold it to the 
ancestor of its present owner. Sir Arthur Ingram? 
Kt., the second son of Hugh Ingram, a London 
merchant, also purchased the Manor of Leeds-Kirk- 
gate, which thus became conjoined with the manor of 
Temple-Newsome. King James's consort, Anne of 
Denmark, with their eldest son and daughter 
followed him in June, and like him neglected Leeds 
though she did not refuse its Manor when it was 
given to her. But when in the summer of 1604 
Lord and Lady Dunfermline and Sir Eobert Carey 
brought with them King James's second son, after- 
ward Charles the First, but then a sickly child from 
three to four years old, York was a victim to the 
plague and they came through Leeds for safety. 



68 



Leeds was to have its turn also of the Plague, 
whereby, as we learn from a decree of the Court of 
Quarter Sessions, the townsmen were "enforced to 
keep watch and ward about the infected houses/' 
So great was the alarm that Leeds' markets were 
intermitted, and in lieu thereof were authorized two 
markets, "the one upon Hunslet Moor, on Monday, 
and the other upon Chapeltown Green, on Friday, 
unto which place,' , said the Court, "the country shall 
bring corn &c, to supply the town." Those, and 
those only, who had "tickets or notes under the 
hand of Eobert Cooke, clerk, vicar, Edward Savile, 
gentleman, high constable, John Harrison, John 
Metcalf, W. Lodge, or two or more of them," certi- 
fying the bearer free from infection, might visit fairs, 
markets, or other business places, to carry wool to 
the spinner and to bring yarn from thence. Of 
course the stringent regulations necessary were not 
quietly submitted to by everybody. One William 
Lawson, "having carried himself in a most dissolute 
and contemptuous manner," was ordered to be "im- 
prisoned within the prison of Leeds" and "kept fast 
locked there for three days," then, "upon his good 
carriage in that time," to be let out, otherwise to have 



69 

"six days imprisonment upon spare diet." Should 
the Plague increase, Justices of the Peace within 
five miles of Leeds were, in case of need, to assess 
for its relief; and the inhabitants were authorized 
"to erect, to make and set up lodges on Woodhouse 
Moor, to place their visited people in." 

If Thoresby guessed right from the figures of the 
Parish Eegister, under dates 1573 and 1575, and 
again in 1587, this was the fourth time within 
forty years when Leeds suffered from the Plague, or 
other contagion. It must have been an anxious 
time for Eobert Cooke, and he was not the sort of 
man to desert his parishioners. Of his popularity 
with them we have the proof of a well filled church. 
The churchwardens' account-book told, in the year 
1608, of a new stall made for Thomas and Peter 
Jackson, "because they had no room anywhere in 
the Church to sit in," this entry being in the hand- 
writing of the Vicar himself. And, says Thoresby, "at 
length all the vacant places being replenished with 
seats, and the Nave of the Church also galleried quite 
round, it was yet found too small for so numerous 
and unanimous a congregation in those happy days." 
So far well, Ealph Thoresby, yet Eobert Cooke with 



70 



the Plague to help him could not bring everybody 
into good behaviour. An order apparently issued by 
the Court of Quarter Sessions soon after the Plague 
had passed away, sets out with a complaint of 
gatherings where the people "use unlawful gaming, 
drinking and quarreling to the great injury and hurt 
of those who there doe not only lose at gaming, or 
spend in drinking, all the money they can get or 
come by/' but also are often " drawn into such lewd- 
ness, as they neglect their own necessary occupation 
and greatly do disquiet and trouble their honest 
neighbours." Therefore, none were to attend "any 
such garrays or merry nights," and offenders were to 
be tried "at the next General Quarter Sessions/' 

Eobert Cooke had more on hand than the work of 
his parish. In 1610 there was a learned disputation 
between him and a noted Eomish priest, called 
Cuthbert Johnson (alias Will Darrell), before the 
King's Council at York. Thoresby had a summary 
of it in manuscript, but it was never published. And 
the title of " Captain Minister of the Yorkshire 
Preachers" given to Eobert Cooke in a Eoman Catholic 
treatise shows that his preaching was not confined to 
Leeds alone. No wonder that in his declining years 



71 



the Vicar needed the help of his brother, Alexander, 
who took much of the parochial labour off his hands 
and left him more leisure for the completion of his 
great work on counterfeits of the ancient authors, 
commonly called "The Fathers." It bore a Latin 
title, Censura, &c; and it was first published in 1614, 
with a dedication to Dr. James, Bishop of Durham, 
by whom its author was collated to a Prebendary in 
Durham Cathedral on the 20th of July in the same 
year. The Prebend's stall was soon vacant for 
another. Eobert Cooke died on the first of January, 
1615, and he was next day laid in the chancel of his 
church. His book reached a second edition in 1623, 
and so famous did it become that two or three editions 
were published in Germany. The last year of his 
life was remarkable for a long drought, succeeding a 
snow-storm, and lasting from April to the 20th of 
August. It is stated in Drake's Eloraeum that hay 
was then sold in York at 30s. and 40s. the wayne 
load, and in Leeds at £4. 

tm Coming events cast their shadows before," and on 
the death of Eobert Cooke we may discern in a 
dispute about the appointment of his successor a 
shadow of the approaching troubles. According to 



72 

Thoresby's account, the purchasers of the advowson 
wished to treat it as their private property. Instead 
of a Trust having been properly constituted, the 
parishioners, who by a voluntary contribution repaid 
the purchasers the £120 paid by them to Oliver 
Darnley, relied chiefly upon the integrity of a Mr. 
Thomas Foxcroft, " a religious and substantial free- 
holder ." He was very likely worthy of their con- 
fidence, but he died ; and when the parishioners, on 
Cooke's death, required the execution of a Trust- 
Deed, the surviving purchasers, .headed by a Mr. 
Birkhead, offered the advowson for sale. Declaring 
the income of the vicarage to be £300 a-year, they 
valued the advowson at £1400 or £1500 — a good 
profit on the purchase from Oliver. A portion of the 
parishioners thereupon applied to Dr. Tobias Mat- 
thews, Archbishop Hutton's successor in the See of 
York, on behalf of Alexander Cooke; and Arch- 
bishop Matthews appointed him to the vicarage. On 
this, Mr. Birkhead, as patron, made choice of Eichard 
Middleton, chaplain to Prince Charles — no bad stroke 
of policy, for it is to be supposed that he had court 
influence wherewith to back him, and he became a 
man of note, known in print. A thick duodecimo 



entitled The Key of David, published after this dis- 
pute, in 1619, was adorned with his portrait, repre- 
senting him in a ruff and with a great beard. The 
Archbishop rejected him, and he then made out his 
writ against the Archbishop and Alexander Cooke. 
The case was decided by the Lord Keeper, the great 
Lord Bacon. Alexander Cooke was confirmed in the 
vicarage. Eobert Birkhead and his co-purchasers 
were ordered to sign over the advowson to Sir John 
Savile, Ki, Sir Philip Gary, Kt., Sir Arthur Ingram, 
Kt., Christopher Danby and others, twenty -five in 
all; and to complete the settlement, Archbishop 
Matthews consented to a measure for extinguishing 
a latent claim to the advowson by the Archbishops 
of York. For Henry the Eighth in an excess of 
generosity had granted it to that See after his grant 
to Thomas Culpepper. But there was more in all this 
than an attempt of Birkhead and his co-purchasers 
to defraud the parish. The Chancery decree recites 
that Alexander Cooke had been made vicar by the 
Archbishop, "at the request of the best and most 
religiously affected of the parishioners. " A petition 
addressed to Queen Anne, as Lady of the Manor, and 
purporting to be from many hundreds of Her 



74 

Majesty's tenants and inhabitants of Leeds, alleges 
that Alexander Cooke had been presented " by the 
means and greatness of Sir John Savile ;" who, also 
said the petitioners, had got inserted as trustees of 
the advowson such persons as were likely to establish 
Cooke in the vicarage, to the disturbance of the peace 
and quiet of the said parish." For, they further 
informed Her Majesty, — " The said Alexander Cooke, 
having heretofore been deprived of a former benefice 
for non-conformity and not subscribing, &c, and 
continuing the same schismatic disposition, doth still 
stir such grief and make such factions among the 
parishioners that divers of the richest and greatest 
traders of the said towne, who set on work above five 
hundred of the poor people, are ready to forsake their 
habitations there, and will leave the same rather than 
endure such a factious person to be their Vicar, who 
was thrust upon them during the said contention and 
came not in by their consent/' To prevent this 
great impoverishing of Leeds, and the disturbance 
and disquieting of a great number of good subjects, all 
of them Her Majesty's tenants, the petitioners begged 
the Queen's mediation with the Lord Keeper, to stay 
the execution of his decree ; and that Queen Anne 



ro 

herself would nominate "some learned and godly- 
divine " in Cooke's place. To get rid of him, they 
would be "contented to allowe the said Cooke to have 
some reasonable sum of money, elsewhere to provide 
himself." 

The truth seems to be that Alexander Cooke was 
what the petitioners asked for — " a learned and godly 
dime;" but that his strong antipathy to the Church 
of Eome led him somewhat toward the Puritan 
party, and raised against him enemies. He took his 
first degree at Brasenose College, on the 25th of 
June, 1585, while his brother was still there; and 
his attainments led to his being chosen for a Percy 
Fellowship at University College, in 1587. He then 
took his degree of Master of Arts, and Holy Orders 
also before his brother left Oxford for Leeds. On the 
26th of May, 1596, he took the further degree 
of Bachelor of Divinity. He was celebrated while 
at Oxford as a preacher, and he obtained a living. 
I know nothing about his vacation of it, except what 
is said in the petition ; but if Eobert Cooke had 
much disapproved of his brother's proceedings he 
would scarcely have employed him as he did, at 
Leeds. The Archbishop's support of Alexander 



76 

Cooke also speaks in his favour. By some, however, 
he was charged with Calvinism ; and any one who 
has read his Pope Joan, first published in 1610, may 
credit Anthony Wood's statement that he was hated 
by the Eoman Catholics. On his part Alexander 
Cooke deplored the falling away of some of his con- 
temporaries to the Church of Eome. His Epistle, 
Dedicatory of Pope Joan, to Archbishop Matthews, 
thus commences, — " It is lamentable to consider how 
many starres are fallen of late from heauen, how 
many Goddesses on the earth haue departed from the 
faith, and giuen heed vnto the spirit of errors, and 
doctrines of slanderers, to wit, the Papists." 

Whether or not Anne of Denmark ever attempted 
the unconstitutional interference with the jurisdiction 
of the head of the Chancery Court which her peti- 
tioners asked for I cannot tell ; but Alexander Cooke, 
continued Vicar of Leeds. He continued his pub- 
lications against the Church of Eome, under titles 
characteristic of the man and of the age that he lived 
in. Work for a Masse-Priest, appeared in 1617; 
More Work for a Masse-Priest, in 1621 ; Yet more 
Work for a Masse-Priest, in 1 622 ; The Abaitment of 
Popish Braggs, pretending Scripture to he theirs, and 



77 

The Weather-cock of Borne s Religion, with her several 
Changes : or the World turned topsie turvie by the 
Papists, in 1625; Work, more Work, ami a little 
more Work for a Masse-Priest ; with an Epistle from 
an Unknown Priest, and an answer thereto, in 1628. 
All were quartos, and all published in London. The 
last named was dedicated to Thomas, Lord Viscount 
Savile, and it reached a second edition in 1630 
Thoresby had them all, and he mentions another 
called Pome's Weather Cock which he had not seen. 
But more famous than all the rest was Pope Joan, of 
which a second edition was published in 1625. It 
was also translated into French by J. de la Montagne, 
and printed at Sedan in 1633, with verses laudatory 
of Le Grand Cooke instead of the Epistle Dedicatory 
to Archbishop Matthews. The book was written to 
maintain " that a woman called Joane was Pope of 
Borne : against the surmises and objections made to the 
contrarie by Eobert Bellarmine and Caesar Baronius, 
Cardinals; Florimondus Boemondus, N. D., and other 
Popish writers impudently denying the same." It 
was in the form of a dialogue between a Protestant 
and a Papist, so written that the subject might be 
more fully discussed, " and that it might be better 



understood to common readers, who are sooner gulled 
with continued discourses." 

It is not likely that the threatened exodus of some 
of the greatest traders of the town was put in execu- 
tion. Anyhow, Leeds continued to make progress, 
though a native poet, author unknown of Pasquils 
Palinodia, published in 1619, thus laments over its 
squabbles and byegone happy days : — 

" And thou my natiue towne, which was of old, Leede 
(When as thy bonfiers burn'd, and Maypoles stood, 
And when thy wassall-cups were vncontrol'd) 
The Sommer bower of peace and neig-hberhood, 
Although since these went down, thou ly'st forlorn 
By factious schisms, and humors overborne, 
Some able hand I hope thy rod will raise, 
That thou maist see once more thy happy daies." 

Days were in store anything but happy, and faction 
was to flourish, but Leeds flourished too. We lost our 
royal Lady of the Manor in February of the year of 
the above mournful ditty ;.but in the next, 1620, the 
Moot-Hall arose, to be adorned near a century later 
with the statue of another Queen Anne. In 1624 
Dr. Samuel Pullen, future Archbishop of Tuam, 
became the first Head Master of the Grammar School, 
newly built by John Harrison; and he married, on the 
8th of June, Anne Cooke, the Vicar's daughter. The 



79 

building yet stands, but not, alas ! as then, in " a 
pleasant field;" and its desecration as a workshop 
troubles Jeremiah Odman only less than the de- 
molition of the Moot-Hall does. I could call like 
Edward Fairfax when James the First died, the 27th 
of March, 1625, on all who have eyes to weep. 
And having already given a specimen of our native 
poetry, I here give another of the poetry of Tasso's 
celebrated translator, for the sake of his residence 
in Kirkgate : — 

"All that have eyes, now wake and weep ; 
He whose waking was our sleep 
Is fallen asleep himself, and never 
Shall wake more, till he wake for ever." 

Be it not forgotten that Edward Fairfax, who wrote 
these lines, once lived in Leeds. 

The next reign was still new when our town was 
advanced in dignity, as, with its Moot-Hall, it well 
deserved to be. On the 13th of July, in his second 
year, Charles the First granted Leeds a Charter of In- 
corporation, appointing Sir John Savile the first chief 
Alderman — since styled Mayor. From his armorial 
bearings Leeds derived those birds of wisdom which 
adorn its own ; but his work was done for him by 
John Harrison. Harrison also joined eight others in 



80 



purchasing Leeds Manor. It had reverted to the 
Crown on the death of Anne of Denmark, and 
two years after giving us his charter Charles the 
First gave the manor to the City of London, which 
Jeremiah Odman declares to be the most indefensible 
thing that the said King Charles ever did. Such 
grant there was, for the records of the Duchy of 
Lancaster testify thereto ; but Leeds, or rather one of 
our Leeds men, interposed, bought the manor from 
the Crown, and the grant fell through. The pur- 
chaser, in the first instance, was Eichard Sykes, 
grandson of him who had wisely settled in Leeds in 
the previous century. Thoresby, who married the 
great-grand-daughter of Eichard Sykes, says that 
"he at the request of Mr. Harrison, the Grand 
Benefactor, let him and a half dozen other gentle- 
men come in as joint-purchasers with him; because 
if in a single person it would have given him too 
great superiority, which the good old gentleman 
not being ambitious of, reserved only one share for 
himself and another for his son, William Sykes, 
Merchant, admitting the rest as he had contracted 
for it." Five of the other half-dozen were Aldermen 
of the new Corporation : — Samuel Casson, the first 



81 



successor of Sir John Savile and John Harrison; 
Thomas Metcalf, son of him who had farmed the 
oven, and the builder of Eed Hall in 1628; Joseph 
Hillary, Benjamin Wade and Francis Jackson. 
Wade filled the office of chief Alderman once only, 
in 1631-2; the rest all lived to hold it a second 
time, and that in nearly like rotation. In 1633 
John Harrison became chief Alderman in name as 
well as deed, succeeding Francis Jackson, and he was 
again followed by Casson. Then came Eichard 
Sykes, Thomas Metcalf, Joseph Hillary and Francis 
Jackson, each havihg been chief Alderman before. 
But in the first instance a Bobert Benson came 
between Casson and Sykes ; in the second a John 
Hodgson between Metcalf and Hillary. The said 
John Hodgson again took office at the end of Francis 
Jackson's second term, Hodgson was then fol- 
lowed by Balph Crofts, and these were the chief 
Aldermen of Leeds from the grant of the Charter to 
the outbreak of civil war. The remaining purchaser 
of the Manor, whom I have not yet named and 
not Alderman at the time, was William Marshall, jun. 
Thoresby's account of the purchase is creditable to 
Eichard Sykes, and John Harrison's share in the 
G 



82 

business is not the least of his merits. The " Grand 
Benefactor" will figure prominently to the end of 
my chapter. 

John Harrison was an only son. He had two 
sisters — Edith, married to Thomas Gledhill, of Bar- 
kisland; and Grace, to Alexander Bobinson, a Leeds 
merchant who lived in Briggate, and whom she left 
a widower in 1607. How far John Harrison derived 
his wealth from his father, from his mother, the 
daughter of Henry Marton, of Leeds; or how far 
he owed it to his own success in business, I do not 
know, but like his father he was a merchant. By 
whatever means, he became the owner of consi- 
derable property in his native town. From the 
Falkinghams he purchased the North Hall estate 
and others, including the old Hall of the Bockleys, 
near to which Bichard Falkingham, the last male 
heir of the family, was slain at the age of twenty 
four. He was grandson of the Thomas Falkingham 
who married Sir Giles Hussey's widow. His death 
might be accidental, but I know not anything more 
about it except the date of his burial, 21st Decem- 
ber, 1615. John Harrison, in a codicil to his will 
made nearly forty years afterward, speaks of "the 



83 

mutual love and affection betwixt me and the said 
Eiehard Falkingham, who would have ventured his 
life for me, if there had been occasion." When this 
was written, John Falkingham, father of Eiehard, 
was dead also, for he outlived his son scarce half-a- 
dozen years. But Eiehard Falkingham had left two 
daughters, his co-heirs, who married; and to their 
eldest sons Harrison bequeathed the profit, and 
something more, which he had made by re-selling 
part of his purchase from the family. This bequest 
in itself shows the kindly feeling which had existed 
between them. 

In Harrison's will there is mentioned a "messuage, 
house, or tenement in Pawdmire," then occupied 
by Timothy Coates and Eobert Hirst. There is 
little doubt that it was the house in which he was 
born, and it seems from this to have been divided, 
unless the two named were tenant and sub-tenant. 
For himself, Harrison built what Thoresby after- 
ward described as "a good old fashioned house, 
with a quadrangular court in the middle." This 
mansion, with its garden, orchard, garden-house and 
other appurtenances was in Briggate, opposite to 
the end of Boar Lane. There John Harrison lived, 



84 

and there he died. He married a lady named 
Foxcroft, from the neighbourhood of Halifax, per- 
haps a relative of the Thomas Foxcroft who took 
a leading part in buying the advowson of our 
vicarage. But she died as early as the 5th of 
May, 1631; and Harrison, a widower and childless, 
bestowed his affections on a fine breed of cats, for 
whose convenience he is said to have had holes 
cut in the doors and ceilings of his house, that 
they might wander through it at will. So Thoresby 
compares him with London's renowned Lord Mayor, 
Sir Eichard Whittington; and John Harrison has 
renown of his own, substantially founded. His 
benevolence extended beyond cats, and it was not 
restricted by a narrow idea of charity. He cared 
for the poor, but what he did for them was only 
part of his scheme for the good of the whole town. 
When the market-tolls of Leeds were referred for 
apportionment, in 1600, to Baron Savile of the 
Exchequer, ancestor of the Earls of Mexborough, 
he gave a third to the Bailiff, another to the poor, 
and another to the market-stead and highways. 
Harrison supplemented this decree by alms-houses, 
with a chapel, and other gifts to the poor; by an 



85 



endowment for the highways, and by adorning the 
market with a cross which Dr. Lake and Thoresby 
pronounced "stately," and which cross existed until 
replaced by another in 1776, which in the end 
perished with Middle Eow and the Moot Hall. The 
pavement at Briggate top for some time preserved 
an outline of the site; but now, even this is gone 
and not a trace is left behind. The third object 
of Harrison's benevolence was not the Bailiff, nor 
his successor the Alderman, but the Grammar 
School of which I have before spoken. For rich 
and poor, young and old, and to relieve the over 
crowded Parish Church, be built St. John's. It 
was begun near the time when his wife died 
and .shortly before the death of the vicar whose 
appointment had been so much contested. Alex- 
ander Cooke was laid near his brother in the 
chancel of the Old Church, on the 23rd of June, 
1632. He had outlived about two years the honor- 
ary Alderman whom Harrison represented, and to 
whose "means and greatness" Alexander Cooke's 
opponents ascribed his appointment to the vicarage. 
Sir John Savile was made Baron Savile of Pontefract 
in 1628, and he died in 1630. His gift of the site 



86 



for Headingley Church adds to his title to remem- 
brance in Leeds. 

Alexander Cooke needed help, like his brother, in 
his declining years, finding himself unequal to the 
preaching of two sermons in a day. In Eichard 
Garbut, B.D., he met with a helper "every way to 
his liking." Garbut was a Yorkshireman who 
became Fellow of Sidney College, Cambridge, and 
so esteemed by the Master, Dr. Ward, that he chose 
Garbut to accompany him to the Synod of Dort. 
On taking his B.D., in 1624, Eichard Garbut 
made several vows, one not to hold his Fellowship 
longer than December in that year. He resigned 
it accordingly, and having no other engagement he 
then lived for a short time with a grandchild of 
Archbishop Matthews to whom he had been tutor. 
About the beginning of 1625 he was engaged by 
the Vicar of Leeds, to whose offer of £50 a year 
he answered "it is enough;" and until his marriage 
he found a home with John Harrison. His sermons 
were well studied, and written almost verbatim 
before he preached them. At first, some of his 
hearers thought them too academical and begged 
for an alteration of their style, and in this he tried 



87 



to please his critics; but fearing after all that he 
failed to do the good which he desired to do, he 
resolved to leave Leeds, and he only remained here 
at the appeal of some of the poorer parishioners. 
In the delivery of his sermons he was earnest and 
too animated for his physical strength, for it led 
to the breaking of a blood vessel. He died from 
consumption in 1630, having hastened his death 
by a disregard of his physician's advice not to preach 
any more. He again ventured, renewed the bleed- 
ing and did not recover. These particulars are to 
be found in a preface to two of his sermons, 
published long after his death with the title One 
come from the Dead, &c, and where it is stated, 
"The year before his death he said to some that 
he doubted his Ministry had not that effect he 
would have it, and he feared the cause was because 
some paid towards his maintenance by way of Col- 
lection for him; I am resolved therefore I will not 
have a penny Collected for me, but will depend 
upon God, for I know that those that get good by 
my pains will not see me want Necessaries; and 
for the rest that get no good, I will have none of 
their Monies." This preface is by a Thomas Hard- 



88 

castle, and, beside it, there is an epistle to the reader 
dated London, August 23rd, 1675, by Eichard Baxter. 
Garbut was succeeded in his lectureship by Eobert 
Todd, afterward Minister of St. John's. 

There was no difficulty about the choice of a new 
vicar, for on the eleventh day after the burial of 
Alexander Cooke his successor was instituted. 
Again did Leeds look at home, and chose Henry 
Eobinson, the son of John Harrison's late sister 
Grace. Baptized at the Parish Church, most likely 
by Eobert Cooke, on the 27th of July, 1598, he was 
first schooled in Leeds ; thence he went to St. John's 
College, Cambridge, took the degree of Bachelor of 
Divinity, and became Chaplain to Lord Treasurer 
the Earl of Southampton. And the Earl unwillingly 
parted with him when, near the age of thirty-four, 
he became vicar of the town in which he was born. 
He also became owner of the library of the two 
brothers his predecessors, including printed books 
and manuscripts which had belonged to Kirkstall 
Abbey, and which an ancestor or ancestors of 
Eobert and Alexander Cooke had the good sense to 
purchase at the Dissolution. 

John Harrison's nephew had entered upon the 



89 

third year of his vicariate when the new church 
was finished. Leading to it, Harrison built the 
New Kirkgate, afterward New Street, afterward 
St. John's Street, and now, as I hear and grieve 
for, about to be swept away. St. John's was 
consecrated on the 21st of September, 1634, by 
Archbishop Neale, unpleasantness arising thereon 
which must have been a sad annoyance to the 
church's founder. It was a darker shadow of the 
coming troubles than was the contention which 
arose about Alexander Cooke. On the afternoon of 
the Consecration day Eobert Todd, disposed to 
Puritan opinions, preached in a strain so opposite 
to the morning sermon by Dr. Cosin, the Arch- 
bishop's chaplain and afterward Bishop of Durham, 
that the Archbishop was offended. The first parson 
of St. John's was suspended for his first sermon 
there; and the Archbishop only rescinded his sus- 
pension at the intercession of John Harrison and 
Sir Arthur Ingram. 

The name of Puritan was at that day lavished 
with more freedom than judgment. Mr. Todd had 
a title to it, as events proved, and John Harrison 
lived to regret the first appointment to his new 



90 

church; but his nephew, the Vicar, was also called 
Puritan, though when the civil war broke out he 
proved himself loyal to Church and King. He 
was nevertheless "much resorted to by that party 
for direction and advice in the way of his functions," 
as Thoresby says, referring to the Puritans ; and in 
the preface to Garbut's two sermons his name is 
given in a list of " faithful and painful Ministers " 
which includes some of the said party. It is to his 
credit that he stood well with that party while he 
held to his own principles. Once he was complained 
of to Archbishop Laud, for a sermon on the text 
"Keep yourselves from idols;" but he came off vic- 
torious, his "innocency" established and his learning 
proved. 

By his support of Todd, John Harrison himself got 
into trouble with the Eoyalists. Loyal, and attached 
to the principles and discipline of the Church of 
England, he was a man of moderation, and likely 
enough he disapproved of many things done on the 
Eoyalist side. Naturally averse from violence, 
shattered in health too, when the war began he 
sought to keep aloof from it. Thus, he suffered first 
from the Eoyalists for his practice, and then, still 



91 



more, from the Puritans for his principles. Yet I 
am disposed to think that on an application for ship- 
money, rather more than a twelvemonth after the 
decision against Hampden, John Harrison's practice 
and his principles would change sides. It was the 
29th of November, 1638, when one William Eobinson 
wrote from his office in " Conistrete, Yorke," to the 
worshipful his "loveing frend Mr. Alderman at 
Leedes," forwarding a writ for a levy " toward the 
setting out of one shippe of fower hundred and 
fiftye tunne (besides tunnage) to be furnished with 
men, tackle, munition, victual and other necessaryes 
for the safeguard of the seas and the defence of the 
realme." The money was to be sent within thirty 
days. " In my judgment/' said Mr. Eobinson, " you 
are kindly used, having but to pay £72 towards soe 
great a charge." He then gave instructions that 
"noe poor labouring people be assessed, but suche 
as have estates in lands and goods, or live by some 
gainefull trade, for it is conceived that the assessing 
poore people will raise a clamour and prejudice the 
service, which in it selfe is most honourable and 
just." The clergy were to be used with all favour ; 
and " not doubting of your care in the performance of 



92 

this service," William Kobinson, of Coney street, 
York, concluded his letter. Now John Harrison was 
the very man to counsel payment of the small sum 
applied for, and to contribute his share of it, however 
doubtful of the legality of ship-money. I do not 
doubt that he condemned the execution of his fellow 
Yorkshireman, the Earl of Strafford, on the 12th of 
May, 1641, as heartily as our vicar his nephew, who 
wrote an elegy thereon, which Dr. Whitaker saw 
in manuscript and pronounced " a composition far 
above mediocrity, and written with all the feeling 
which was dictated by the interesting character of 
the sufferer, and the cruel mockery of justice by which 
he was condemned." 

The character given of himself by Edward Fairfax 
the poet might have been appropriated by John 
Harrison, "neither a fantastic Puritan nor super- 
stitious Papist." He could, on occasion arising, assert 
his rights against any side. In June, 1642, while 
King Charles was at York, there was a Commission 
of Array and Harrison sent a horse for view. It was, 
he relates, " stayed by Sir John Goodrick, and forth- 
with by me recalled from him by strong hand," Sure 
I am that it was not disloyalty which caused Har- 



93 

rison to reclaim his horse. Perhaps he was the 
more resolute in having it back because it had been 
sent for view on account of a partner as well as 
himself. Irrespective of this, John Harrison would 
desire to keep neutral. When afterward in trouble 
with the Parliamentarians over this very horse case, 
a friend ventured to plead for him that he was a 
" timorous man and very fearful." It would be less 
to his taste to contribute to the war than to support 
the Eothwell movement, sanctioned by the King's 
Lieutenant-General in Yorkshire, the Earl of Cum- 
berland, for maintaining the peace and neutrality of 
the county. And near the time of the neutrality 
treaty of Eothwell, about a month after King Charles 
left York to set up his standard at Nottingham, 
there was a peace meeting held at Leeds in which 
Harrison may have taken part. But peace and 
neutrality were not to be. 

At eight o'clock at night on the 27th of Sep- 
tember, 1642, the Earl of Northumberland, Sir 
Harry Vane and other Parliamentarian leaders 
wrote thus from Westmoreland to "My Lords and 
Gentlemen" of Yorkshire, — "We have received 
information that at a late meeting at Leeds divers 



94 

worthy gentlemen and others, well-affected inhabi- 
tants of Yorkshire, have declared themselves desirous 
to preserve the peace of that county, and to secure 
his Majesty's subjects from those violent oppressions 
executed upon their persons and estates by the Earl 
of Cumberland, the Lord Savile and others, by 
pretence of commission of array." Assuming the 
meeting to be a declaration in their favour, North- 
umberland and his colleagues authorised and desired 
the military force of the County to be raised under 
command of Ferdinando, the second Lord Fairfax, 
whom they engaged to recommend to the Earl of 
Essex, chief commander of the Parliamentarian army, 
for a commission. Without waiting for it, Lord 
Fairfax acted on the instructions in the letter ; and 
his son Sir Thomas states in his Memorials—" The 
first action we had was at Bradford." The Ptoyalists 
were repulsed and they retired to Leeds, whither 
Lord Fairfax followed in a few days. Having notice 
of his approach, the Eoyalists further retreated to 
York. Despite the opposition of a Eoyalist force 
under Sir Thomas Glemham, Governor of York, 
Lord Fairfax, advancing from Leeds, gained pos- 
session of Wetherby and Tadcaster. This led to 



95 

the Earl of Newcastle's march from the north, where 
he had raised forces for the King. He arrived 
at York on the last day of November, and to him 
the Earl of Cumberland resigned his commission. 

In a letter written ten days afterward, Lord 
Fairfax said that he had so far supported his army 
" by the loanes and contributions for the most part 
of the parishes of Leedes, Halifax and Bradford, and . 
some other small clothing-towns adjacent, being the 
only well-affected people of the country." And in 
Lord Clarendon's history there is the well-known 
passage, — "Leeds, Halifax and Bradford, three very 
populous and rich towns (which depending wholly 
upon clothiers too much maligned the gentry), were 
wholly at their disposition;" that is, at the disposition 
of the party opposed to the King. Nevertheless, 
this needs qualification so far, at least, as it concerns 
Leeds. The Vicar was a Eoyalist as I said before. 
Visiting York when King Charles was there, his 
old patron the Earl of Southampton wished him to 
preach before the King. "Follow peace with all 
men, and holiness, without which no man shall see 
the Lord," was the text of the one sermon which 
our Vicar had with him; and he had a conscious- 



96 



ness that it was not entirely in accord with a 
proclamation issued at that very time. But no 
excuse availed him; and so satisfied was the King 
with the sermon that, says Thoresby, "His Majesty 
graciously thanked him at dinner, and offered him 
the title of his Chaplain, but this he modestly 
declined, alledging that it would be of more real 
service to the King to bestow that Dignity upon 
some more suitable person." And in his Eoyalist 
opinions the Vicar had support among his parish- 
ioners, those very clothiers whom Clarendon puts 
in opposition to the gentry. Several of the more 
wealthy of them suffered in estate under subsequent 
Parliamentarian sequestrations, beside John Harri- 
son. More conclusive still, the Puritan author of 
"The Eider of the White Horse and his Army" says 
of Leeds at the commencement of the war, — "The 
malignant humour being predominant, easily con- 
verted the towne into their temper." 

Lord Newcastle was not long idle after he reached 
York. Early in December, 1642, he made an 
attack on Lord Fairfax's position at Tadcaster 
which resulted in Fairfax's retreat to Selby. On 
the 9th Lord Fairfax sent Sir Thomas with five 



97 

companies of foot and two of horse to secure Leeds 
and the other clothing towns if possible, but after 
marching as far as Sherburne Sir Thomas found 
it necessary to return. Cut off from the district 
whence he had obtained his funds, and with only 
a week's pay for his troops in hand, Lord Fairfax 
sent the Parliament in London an account of his 
position, and of his sturdy resistance at Tadcaster 
before retreating, and appealed earnestly for the 
money necessary if his forces were to be kept longer 
together. One of his officers, Captain Hatcher, an 
eye-witness of most that had occurred "from the 
first raising of arms," carried the letter. Part of 
the Eoyalist force, under Sir William Savile of 
Thornhill, a distant relative of our first Alderman, 
then occupied Leeds. On Sunday, the 18th of 
December, he made an attack on Bradford, but he 
returned to Leeds unsuccessful. On the 29th Lord 
Fairfax again wrote from Selby, giving an account 
of Savile's failure, and stating that Sir Thomas 
Fairfax and Sir Henry Foulis had been sent by 
him to Bradford with three troops of horse and 120 
dragoons, and that they had safely arrived there. 
From Bradford, Sir Thomas wrote thus to his father 

H 



98 

on the 9th of January, 1643, — "These parts grow 
very impatient of our delay in beating them out 
of Leeds and Wakefield, for by them all trade and 
provisions are stopped, so that people in these 
Clothing towns are not able to subsist." In his 
Memorials he states that "there lay at Leeds fifteen 
hundred of the enemy, and twelve hundred at 
Wakefield," and that parties of horse from those 
towns daily approached Bradford, causing skirmishes ; 
but that the Parliamentarians became so bold and 
the Eoyalists so disheartened that the latter at 
length kept to their garrisons. On the 16th of 
January Sir Thomas took and garrisoned Howley 
Hall, built by our first Alderman and then the 
seat of the second Lord Savile. Lord Fairfax sent 
there, from Selby, his relative Sir William Fairfax 
of Steeton to raise a regiment in the district. Sir 
William proceeded thence to Bradford, where also 
Lord Fairfax sent what horse he could spare to aid 
in his son's design on Leeds. 

It was on the morning of Monday the 23rd of 
January, 1643, that Sir Thomas Fairfax sent some 
dragoons under Captain Mildmay, with about 30 
musketeers and 1000 of the irregulars called club- 



99 

men, along the south of the Aire to Hunslet Moor 
to attack Leeds from that side of the river. Sir 
Thomas himself crossed the Aire at Apperley Bridge 
with the rest of his force to attack from the west 
side of the town, the bridge at Kirkstall having 
been broken down by the Eoyalists for about 
twenty yards. Under him were Sir William Fair- 
fax, commanding nearly 1000 musketeers and 1000 
club-men; and Sir Henry Fowlis, in command of 
six troops of horse and two companies of dragoons. 
They encamped on Woodhouse Moor. Sir Thomas 
says in his Memorials that on his summoning the 
Eoyalists to surrender Leeds "They presently re- 
turned this answer, that it was not civilly done to 
come so near before I sent the summons, and that 
they would defend the town the best they could 
with their lives." But a tract called A true Rela- 
tion of the Passages at Leeds, which seems to have 
been written by a Parliamentarian immediately 
after the fight, gives more particulars. The attacking 
force first "commending the cause to God by prayer" 
upon Woodhouse Moor, Sir Thomas Fairfax "dis- 
peeded a trumpeter to Sir William Savile, who com- 
manded in chiefe in Leeds, requiring in writing that 
LofC. 



100 

towne to be delivered to him for the King and Parlia- 
ment ; which Sir William disdainfully answered and 
said, he used not to give answer to such frivolous 
tickets." Drawing closer to the town Sir. Thomas 
again summoned Sir William Savile, who by a trum- 
peter replied that Sir Thomas " should get nothing 
but by fight." Two thousand men, according to the 
tract, fifteen hundred, according to the Memorials and 
a letter by Lord Fairfax, defended Leeds. They had 
two pieces of artillery, brass sakers or demi-culverins. 
A trench two yards broad, with an embankment 
two yards in height, had been cut from " Mr. Harri- 
son's new church" to the river side. Within it was 
another trench "compassing about the declivity of 
the hill a little above the water." Now is it this 
trench, or, as supposed, the moat of the vanished 
castle, which has been brought to light in excavating 
at Mill Hill? At two in the afternoon the fight 
began, and at four the town was taken. Lord Fairfax 
states that the loss in killed did not amount on both 
sides to more than forty; but five hundred Eoyalists 
were taken prisoners. At the beginning of the fight 
some musketiers within the trenches fired, but too 
high, at the musketiers outside, who on their part 



101 

M shrouded themselves under a hill at the south head 
of the great fields before the great long trench " 
(The Park), and shot at the embankment. After an 
hour of this harmless firing, some of Captain Mild- 
may's musketiers made their way to a point on the 
south bank of the river opposite to the end of the 
trench and fired into it. This unlooked for attack, 
against which no provision had been made, caused a 
panic. The Eoyalists ran, the musketiers over the 
river shouted to their comrades before the trench, 
w^ho then entered it and passed along the inside to 
some works " at the lane near Mr. Metcalf 's house," 
otherwise Guildford Street. Despite "fierce shot" 
from a house then building there, they forced this 
point also, fighting and psalm-singing in true Puritan 
style; for with them was Jonathan Scholefield, 
Minister of Croston Chapel in Halifax parish. They 
were joined by another party who came along Park 
Lane and entered the town with them. Sir "William 
Fairfax and Sir Thomas Nbrcliffe had led foot com- 
panies " to the west side of the new church, and the 
troops of horse attending the enemies' outroads on 
the west and north parts." Near the church Sir 
Thomas Norcliffe forced an entrance. The two parties 



102 

must have met in the Head Eow, or at John Harri- 
son's Cross, whence some would proceed by the Moot 
Hall, others by Eockley Hall and Vicar Lane, to the 
centre of the town. Lord Fairfax says in his account 
— " The people do observe that Sir William Savile, 
and the commanders on the other side, soon after the 
fight began, fled by secret ways towards Pontefract 
and their men after them by degrees." But accord- 
ing to the tract, Sir William only fled after a fruitless 
attempt to rally his men, and after one of his cannon, 
so posted (perhaps in front of the Moot Hall), as to 
command the lower part of Briggate had been cap- 
tured. The other gun was on the Bridge, which Sir 
William endeavoured to cross; but finding the passage 
blocked by the force under Mildmay he returned and, 
with others, cut a way through a body of the 
Parliamentarians between the Old Church and the 
river side. They then forded the Aire, Vicar Eobin- 
son escaping with them. The risk was great, some 
were drowned, but not the Vicar as reported. One of 
those drowned or said to be was a Mr. Jackson of 
Leeds, perhaps he who had twice been Alderman. 
Lord Fairfax says that beside prisoners the Eoyalists 
lost many arms, the two guns " and all the munition 



103 

they had which was not much." The Parish Church 
Eegister has the following entry, — "23 Jan. 1642" 
(old style, 1643 new), " Leedes was taken by Sir Th. 
Fairfax, 11 soldiers slain, buried 24th — ten unpaid 
for ; five more slain two or three days after ; six more 
died of their wounds/' 

The fate of Leeds on this occasion is told by 
Lord Fairfax in his letter to the Parliament on the 
26th of January, announcing the success achieved. 
" My son/' he wrote, " upon the taking of Leeds, 
though he entered it by force, yet he restrained 
his army from pillaging; so I have ordered that 
the Malignants, in lieu of the spoil challenged to 
be due unto the soldiers, shall give them a month's 
entertainment, which I hope will content both 
parties." Here again is evidence that Leeds was 
not, as Clarendon says, wholly devoted to the Par- 
liamentarians ; and the " content" of the " Malig- 
nants," otherwise Eoyalists, with Lord Fairfax's 
arrangement is open to question. Most of the 
prisoners taken were discharged, on oath never 
to serve more against "King and Parliament." 
The loss of Leeds materially affected the Eoyalist 
movements in our neighbourhood. In about a 



104 



couple of hours after the town was taken Sir 
Thomas Fairfax received intelligence that Wakefield 
was abandoned, and he sent a garrison to occupy it. 
And Lord Fairfax thus concludes the before-men- 
tioned letter, — "Yesternight intelligence was brought 
to me, that the Earl of Newcastle hath drawn down 
all his forces from the south parts of Yorkshire, 
those only excepted that kept the castle at Ponte- 
fract; for yesterday he marched from Sherburne 
to York, with 36 colours, 2 pieces of cannon, 45 
other carriages ; the certain cause I do not yet 
know, but suppose it to meet the arms and ammu- 
nition coming from Newcastle; or to prepare for 
the Queen's entertainment at York which is much 
spoken of. I shall carry a vigilant eye upon his 
designs, and endeavour to prevent them, so far as 
can be expected from the forces under the command 
of, Sir, &c, &c, Fee. Fairfax." 

This letter gave much satisfaction to the Parlia- 
ment. An Ordinance relating to it was entered on 
the journals of the House of Lords; and on the 3rd 
of February the inspirited Commons appointed a 
Committee for sequestrating the real and personal 
estate "of all such persons as have been, are, or 



105 

shall be, in actual war or arms against the Parlia- 
ment." But the cautious " so far as can be expected" 
with which Lord Fairfax wound up was not super- 
fluous. On the day after writing it he was thus 
addressed by his son, with whom, on Newcastle's 
retreat to York, he could again communicate freely, — 
" I am at Wakefield now, but I return this day to 
Leeds. ... If we could join all our forces, your 
lordship might resolve of some notable design, but 
Leeds, Wakefield and other places doth so view 
our strength as we can do little." In fact, the 
Fairfaxes had not strength enough to follow up 
their success. 

Lord Fairfax was right in his conjecture that 
one reason for the Earl of Newcastle's retreat to 
York was to prepare for the Queen's arrival. 
Henrietta Maria landed at Bridlington Quay, from 
Holland, three weeks after the taking of Leeds. 
She arrived at York in March. Sir Thomas Fairfax 
rejoined his father at Selby; but a suspicion that 
Sir John Hotham, Governor of Hull, and his son 
Captain Hotham, were about to leave the Parlia- 
mentarians and make their own terms with Lord 
Newcastle, induced Lord Fairfax to quit Selby for 



106 



Leeds. Lord Fairfax, with fifteen hundred men, 
ordnance and ammunition, marched here direct from 
Selby. Sir Thomas, meanwhile, to deceive the 
Royalists as to his father's real aim, made an attack 
on Tadcaster, which he quitted after two or three 
hours occupation on the approach of Lord Goring, 
sent against him by Newcastle at the head of some 
troops of horse. On the 30th of March the Queen 
wrote from York to Charles the First, — " The rebels 
have quitted Tadcaster, upon our sending forces to 
Wetherby, but they are returned with twelve hundred 
men ; we send more forces to drive them out, though 
those we have already at Wetherby are sufficient.'' 
Her anticipations, often too sanguine, were at this 
time justified. The feint on Tadcaster so far suc- 
ceeded that the main army under Lord Fairfax 
reached Leeds unmolested; but when Sir Thomas 
also arrived here, about an hour after his father, 
his force had been completely routed on Seacroft 
Moor. "Buried, 1st April 1643, Captain Boswell 
slain at Seacroft battel and six soldiers," is an entry 
in our Parish Eegister referring to this event. 

It is remarkable that, in his Memorials, Sir Thomas 
Fairfax omits all notice of the siege of Leeds by 



107 



the Koyalists, which immediately followed the arrival 
here of his father and himself. On the 3rd of April 
Queen Henrietta wrote to the King, " Our army 
marches to-morrow to put an end to Fairfax's excel- 
lency ;" and in another letter, apparently written on 
the 8th, is the news — " Our army having found 
nothing at Pontefract — the enemies having left it 
on their arrival — have followed them to Leeds, which 
they have begun to attack to-day." On the 9th 
she continued, — " Our army is gone to Leeds, and 
at this time are beating down the town." Queen 
Henrietta was too sanguine here. A fortnight later, 
on the 23rd of April, she again wrote from York to 
the King ; the Earl of Newcastle being then absent 
at his wife's funeral, and the Queen having, it is 
said, caused discontent by some changes which she 
made among the officers of the besieging army. She 
thus wrote, — " I know not whether you are informed 
of what has passed at Leeds. I had rather tell it 
you, for I shall do it without partiality, which is no 
small thing. Jealousy has crept from the west to 
the north — we are not free from it. . . . The 
army marched to Pontefract ; I hear that the rebels 
quitted the place, and went to Leeds to join the rest 



108 



of Fairfax's forces : our troops followed them, and 
it was resolved to besiege Leeds : on that, the 
approaches were made with very little resistance, 
and very fair success, although they shot perpetually 
from the town ; but when our cannon came to play, 
it produced no effect, on which a council of war was 
called, to know whether the town should be forced 
by an assault, or rather by a siege. General King, 
and all the old officers from Holland, were of opinion 
that an assault was too dangerous, and might cause 
the ruin of all that army, by too severe a slaughter, 
and also that a siege was impossible, as we were not 
enough to make lines of circumvallation, the town 
being of very large circumference, and the weather 
also being bad; so that they resolved to raise the 
siege. General Goring, and the fresh commanders, 
were all for an assault, and I was with them. There 
were warm disputes thereupon, but the general, 
seeing that the experienced persons were against it, 
and that should he command them to it by his 
absolute power all would not have gone on as in 
other circumstances it would, resolved to raise the 
siege. Goring the father being there present, desired 
the general to permit him to speak to Stockdale, 



109 



one of his acquaintance, who was with Fairfax, 
and had desired to speak to him before, to see if 
it was not because they were willing to treat. The 
general permitted it, on condition that what he 
said should be as out of his own head, and not 
from him. On that, Goring went into the town, 
and learned that they desired to have a cessation 
of arms for four days, during which they wished 
to treat. This was granted to them, being a thing 
in which we risked nothing, since we had resolved 
to raise the siege, and were therefore very glad to 
accept it, to make our retreat more honourable. 
The treaty came to nothing, and our army went off 
to Wakefield, where it now is, taking all the advan- 
tages over the enemy that it can. From Leeds, the 
general went home, which retards us all this time 
from doing anything." 

Our Parish Church Eegister at this time is very 
provoking. It tells us only, — "A gentleman and 
two common soldiers slain in Eobt. Williamson's 
house of Hunslet, buried 13th of April, 1643." 
But in Cavalier Hill we have a memorial of the 
Eoyalist position, and Thoresby catalogued among 
his treasures "a large ball of stone shot out of the 



110 



Cannon called the Queens Pocket Pistol, in the 
late wars, from Cavalier Hill into this street; it is 
'yet above a yard in circumference." It was given 
to Thoresby by Henry Pawson, merchant, of Leeds. 
And very likely at this time was buried the earthen 
jug containing silver coin of the reigns of Edward 
the Sixth, Elizabeth and Charles the First, covered 
in with a slate, which was found on the 23rd 
of May 1760. It was on pulling down an old 
house near Timble Bridge, belonging to John 
Milner, a shop-keeper, that this treasure was dis- 
covered about half-a-yard below the surface. The 
civil war thus operated like the Scottish inroads of 
the fourteenth century. 

The siege cannot have lasted more than a week. 
It commenced, according to the Queen's letters, on 
the 8th or 9th of April, and on the 17th Lord 
Goring wrote from York to his son the General 
urging the resumption of the treaty, which, as the 
Queen relates, had served as a pretext for raising 
the siege. Lord Goring's letter showed the importance 
of gaining the town by some means, for while 
held by Fairfax it prevented the army under New- 
castle from aiding the King's cause elsewhere. He 



Ill 

added in a postscript, — "After I had sealed my 
letter I was advised to advertise you, that the Lord 
Fairfax never believed that you would look into 
the parts where you now are, but intended to draw 
back to the place from whence you came, which 
made him so lofty in his conditions, wherefore if 
you can (as my Authors propose) get between 
Bradford and Leeds, you will so annoy, divert and 
separate them in all their designs, as you may be 
sure to carry Halifax and Bradford on that hand 
or Leeds on the other." And after signing the 
postscript Lord Goring made this brief but signifi- 
cant addition, — " Cudgell them to a Treaty, and then 
let us alone with the rest." The Queen, anxious 
to join her husband at Oxford, had special reason 
to desire the capture of Leeds, for while it remained 
in the hands of Fairfax the Earl of Newcastle was 
unwilling to weaken his army, by detaching from 
it the force by which she ought to be accompanied. 
The Fairfaxes knew the value of their position 
as well as their opponents, and they held Leeds 
as long as they could. On the 18th of May the 
Queen, still at York, wrote to the King, — " Our 
army is now to go to Leeds, Bradford and Halifax, 



112 



which is only twenty miles from Manchester, which 
will give such a fright to Manchester that the 
rebels, who were over-running that country, will 
come to shut themselves up ; . . . for I think 
that Leeds being taken, the two other places are 
not considerable, and thus Manchester will come 
into play, which, if we take it, all Lancashire is 
yours." The two other places, Bradford and Halifax, 
" not considerable " ! How now about " not so 
quik " ? The poor Queen's imagination ran on 
rather too quickly though, the success that she 
hoped for required longer time. Besides continuing 
to hold Leeds, Lord Fairfax sent Sir Thomas with 
seven or eight hundred foot, and three troops of horse, 
to Bradford ; and the Queen wrote in another letter 
that some arms coming from Newcastle were "in 
the greatest danger of being taken, troops having 
gone out of Leeds towards Knaresborough to meet 
them." And on the night of Saturday the 20th of 
May Lord Fairfax sent horse, foot and dragoons from 
Leeds, Bradford and Halifax, to join the garrison 
at Howley for an attack on Wakefield, Sir Thomas 
commanding. On the 21st, Whitsunday, Wake- 
field was taken, General Goring himself being among 



113 

the prisoners taken with it. His fathers letter, 
before quoted, was found at his lodging and sent 
to Lord Fairfax, who forwarded it to the Speaker 
of the House of Commons in a letter of his own, 
dated Leeds 23rd May. Along with it was sent a 
more formal letter, with the same date, giving a 
list of the prisoners. This was signed Thomas 
Stockdell, doubtless the Stockdale whom Queen 
Henrietta mentions as an acquaintance of Lord 
Goring. Among the Parliamentarians killed in the 
attack was Ealph Thoresby, half-brother to the 
grandfather of our great antiquary. He was brought 
to Leeds and buried at "the new Church." 

In his letter, Lord Fairfax gives the following 
account of our neighbourhood : — " Here about Leeds, 
Bradford and Hallifax, being a mountainous barren 
Country, the people now begin to be sensible of want, 
their last year's provisions being spent, and the enemy's 
garrisons stopping all the provisions both of Corn and 
Flesh, and other necessaries that were wont to come 
from the more fruitful countries to them, their trade 
utterly taken away, their poor innumerable and 
great scarcity of means to relieve them. And this 
army which now lies amongst them to defend them 
I 



114 



from the enemy cannot defend them from want, 
which causeth much murmure and lamentation 
amongst the people/' 

On the 27th of May the Queen wrote again to the 
King ; and after referring to the loss of Wakefield, of 
which she had before sent account, she went on : — 
" During this time, my Lord Newcastle sent to beg 
me to stay till he had taken Leeds, and to give 
him the arms that I had reserved for you; or else 
he could do nothing. ... I hope that between 
this and your reply Leeds will either be taken or 
given up. The rebels are grown strong, and we 
weakened since our loss ; but I hope that, if we 
take Leeds, all will yet go well." How impor- 
tant was Leeds ! In a postscript the Queen added 
among other information : — " I shall set out the 
31st of this month, and that it may not be 
hindered I keep it very secret. I pretend only to go 
to Pontefract during the time they are besieging 
Leeds, which will not be, being impossible, bringing 
you the force which I do. . . .If you permit me 
to stay, I shall stay to besiege Leeds at once, although 
I am dying to join you ; but I am so enraged to go 
away without having beaten these rascals, that if you 



115 

permit me, I will do that, and then will go to join 
you ; and if I go away, I am afraid that they would 
not be beaten. " In a letter to the Duke of Hamilton 
the Queen wrote about the same time : — " If the King 
does not press me to go to him quickly, I hope to 
see Leeds taken before I part;" but early in June 
Henrietta Maria left York for Oxford, Leeds still 
untaken, and Lord Fairfax confirmed in his resolution 
to hold it by his knowledge of Lord Goring' s letter. 
"Five soldiers more were slain. Nine more in May, 
1643," is the only additional information in the 
Parish Eegister. 

After the Queen's departure, the Earl of Newcastle 
successfully tried the policy which Lord Goring had 
recommended. On Wednesday, the 21st of June, his 
army, marching from Pomfret, arrived before Howley 
Hall. A summons to surrender was sent to the com- 
mander of the Parliamentarian garrison, Sir John 
Savile, of Lupset, belonging to another branch of our 
first Alderman's family. He "returned an uncivil 
answer, that he would keep it maugre our forces," 
says a tract apparently written by Newcastle himself, 
entitled "An Expresse relation of the Passages and 
Proceedings of His Majesty's Armie, under the Earl 



116 



of Newcastle, against Fairfax." Sir John Savile's 

brave answer was as unfortunate as his Koyalist 

relative's had before been at Leeds. The next morning 

Howley Hall was taken by assault, "and in it the said 

commander-in-chief, and all his officers, and soldiers, 

about 245, some whereof were slain, the rest taken 

prisoners." Bad weather prevented Lord Newcastle 

from moving forward until the end of the month, but 

he then marched to Adwalton Moor. Sir Thomas 

Fairfax says in his memorials : — " Hitherto, through 

God's mercy, we had held up near two years against 

a potent army. But, they finding us to be almost 

tired of continual service, and treacherously used by 

friends," — alluding, I suppose, to the Hothams, — 

u and in want of many things necessary for support, 

and defence, the Earl of Newcastle marched with an 

army of ten or twelve thousand men to besiege us, 

and resolved to sit down before Bradford, which was 

a very untenable place. Hither my father drew all 

the forces he could spare out of the garrisons ; but 

seeing it impossible to defend the town otherwise 

than by strength of men, and that we had not above 

ten or twelve days' provision for so many as were 

necessary to keep it, we resolved the next morning 






117 

very early, with a body of three thousand men, to 
attempt his whole army, as they lay in their quarters 
three miles off. Hoping by it to put him to some 
distraction, which could not be done any other way, 
on reason of the unequal numbers." At Adwalton 
the two armies met, the Earl of Newcastle there 
defeated Fairfax on Saturday the 1st of July, and 
the same night came before Bradford on the side of 
Bowling. In hope of securing Leeds, Lord Fairfax 
withdrew at once. On Sunday night Sir Thomas 
made his escape to Leeds, whence his father and he 
went again to Selby. "At Leeds," he relates, "I found 
all in great distraction; the council of war newly risen, 
where it was resolved to quit the town and retreat 
to Hull, which was sixty miles off, and many of the 
enemy's garrisons lay in the way. This, in two hours 
after, was accordingly done, lest the enemy should 
presently send horse to prevent us ; for they had 
fifty or sixty troops within three miles. But we got 
well to Selby where there was a ferry, and hard by 
a garrison at Cawood" On the morning of Monday 
the 3rd of July, Newcastle's army entered Bradford ; 
and the "Expresse Belation" says,— " Within three 
hours after came a Captain of ours, who among 



118 



divers other prisoners at Leedes, finding that my Lord 
Fairfax and his son were inclined to leave the town 
(as they did) attended with three or four troops of 
horse, 200 Dragoons and 300 Foot, broke out of 
prison, possessed themselves of the Magazine, took 
all the arms which were 1500 at least, eight barrels 
of Powder and twelve pieces of Ordnance, with a 
great proportion of Matches and Balls, and so kept 
the town until I sent forces into it, besides the 
enlarging of seven hundred prisoners there. " Thus 
Leeds was recovered by the Eoyalists after the 
Parliamentarians had held it a little over five months. 
Halifax also fell into the hands of the Eoyalists, and 
Lord Newcastle went to Denton House, near Otley, 
the seat of Lord Fairfax. 

The Fairfaxes saw their work undone. Great 
was the consternation of the London Parliament on 
hearing the news of Adwalton Moor, and it was 
forthwith resolved to seek aid from Scotland. All 
lost with the loss of Leeds ! 

John Harrison's proceeding during these events 
was significant of the man and of his principles. 
When a friend, as before said, alleged that he was 
timorous, Adam Baynes, the Member for Leeds in 



119 

the Commonwealth Parliament, made answer : — 
" Yea, Mr. Harrison is a timorous man, for when 
my Lord Fairfax's drums did beat in Leeds he was 
troubled and afraid, and went to' Otley side. But 
when the Earl of Newcastle's drums beat he was 
not then afraid but came to Leeds." To this 
Harrison's friend could not reply, so we may 
conclude that the truth had been spoken. John 
Harrison's endeavour to be neutral did not secure 
for him the quiet which he sought. Though 
encouraged to return to Leeds by the success of 
the Eoyalists, he was to find annoyance from the 
Royalist side. Sir John Goodrick had not forgotten 
the horse " recalled from him by strong hand," and, 
backed by Sir William Savile, he insisted upon having 
another. Harrison states that he contributed 
another horse to the Eoyalist army about the end 
of 1643, "upon the cruel threatenings of Sir Wil- 
liam Saville " and others. He adds, — " I withstood 
the sending of the latter till a major, a captain and 
a squadron of soldiers were sent to my bedside to 
seize upon my person (then sick), and likewise upon 
my estate." His account is corroborated by the 
Counsellor who pleaded for him against the Parlia- 



120 

mentarian sequestration, saying, as related to Har- 
rison by a correspondent, — " Sir William Savile and 
Sir John Goodrick were both of a party, and Sir 
"William Savile having before called you Eound- 
head and an enemy to the King, first threatened 
you, and after assessing you £500 unless you sent 
a horse again," &c. Neither side probably cared 
about the horse itself, but each stood out for what 
he maintained to be his right; and Sir John Goodrick 
being the stronger under existing circumstances had 
his way. 

Thoresby had a manuscript account of the civil 
war from 1641 to 1646 which contained an account 
of the taking of Leeds by Fairfax. He had also 
in manuscript, — " Notes and Observations of Eobert 
Nesse, of Leeds, late Sergeant-at-Mace, concerning 
the late wars," &c. These very likely told more 
than I can about the events of the time. The 
Eoyalists lost the ascendency which they gained 
w T ith Leeds. The Parliament came to terms with 
the Scotch, who sent an army into England. It 
crossed the Tyne on the 22nd of February, 1644. 
The Earl of Newcastle drew off his forces northward 
to oppose it. A movement on Selby made in April 






121 

by Lord Fairfax and his son brought the Earl 
back, and he occupied York. Lord Fairfax met 
the Scots at Wetherby. They undertook together 
the siege of York; and on the 2nd of July, 
1644, one day short of a year after the Eoyalists 
regained Leeds, the Boyalist cause in the North 
was lost at Marston Moor though several of the 
Yorkshire castles still held out for the Xing. A 
defeat of Lord Fairfax before Pomfret early in 
1645 caused alarm among the Parliamentarians in 
this neighbourhood. Part of the routed army, under 
Sir John Savile of Lupset, forced their way through 
the Eoyalists at Long-Houghton and got to Brad- 
ford, whence Sir John wrote thus to Fairfax on 
the 2nd of March, — " It was generally conceived 
most secure to make for Bradford, in regard we did 
not know how the enemy had dispersed themselves 
towards Leeds." And on the 14th he wrote from 
Wakefield, — "The town of Leeds was too fearful 
that I sent all my foot thither, and if I should 
have had occasion to have removed from hence? 
I might have made my retreat thither to my 
foot, and so have marched in an entire body to 
Tadcaster." Part of the Scotch army lay at Leeds 



122 



in April, when Lord Fairfax had recovered from 
his defeat and renewed the siege of Pomfret Castle. 
Major-General Carter was then military governor 
of Leeds for the Parliamentarians, as we learn 
from the records of a pestilence which added to the 
troubles of war. 

On the 11th of March, 1645, was buried, says 
the Parish Eegister, Alice, wife of John Musgrave 
of Vicar Lane. She was the first suspected to have 
died of the plague ; but it is said that some had 
died of it as early as the month of August before, 
though in that stirring time the plague was not 
then detected. The day after Alice Musgrave's 
funeral a return of the number of deaths was sent 
in to General Carter, and further returns were 
continued down to Christmas Day in the same 
year. They give a total of 1325 deaths, and the 
highest return, 126, was for the last week of July. 
The plague prevailed in March Lane, the Calls, the 
lower part of Briggate and in Mill Hill ; but it was 
the worst in Vicar Lane. Several who died there 
were buried in Vicar's Croft and North Hall 
Orchard to avoid the danger of further carriage — 
a statement significant enough. The market was 



123 

removed to Woodhouse Moor, and grass grew in 
the deserted streets and market places. So it is 
said, and there is no reason for disbelieving it ; but 
bordering on the marvellous is another statement — 
that in the month of June the air was not only very- 
warm, but so infectious u that cats and dogs, mice 
and rats died, also several birds in their flight over 
the town dropped down dead." Cabins erected on 
Quarry Hill for the relief of the plague- stricken 
gave the name of Cabin Closes to their locality 
in after time. The Eoyalist Vicar was in hiding 
or captivity; his helper, Mr Moore, had been turned 
out of the lectureship; and on the 2nd of July 
the Old Church was shut up altogether. So the 
Puritan Minister of St. John's was alone in his 
duty. He kept to it bravely; and it is told of 
him that he preached repeatedly "on Hezekiah's 
boil." 

At the end of 1645 the Plague had passed away, 
but the war lingered on another year. Leeds re- 
mained in the hands of the Parliamentarians. In 
April, 1646, the old Church was re-opened, but an 
eccentric Puritan named Peter Saxton, born at 
Bramley, took the Vicar's place. In James the 



124 

First's reign he had been a clergyman of the Church 
of England. Later in life he left both church and 
country, and went to New England in America. 
Some disputes in the colony ultimately led to his 
return to England. "Hey for Heaven, Hey for 
Heym, " he cried out during a storm on his 
homeward voyage ; and the anecdote gives a 
clue to his character. " He had indeed many plain 
expressions," says Thoresby, " which often occasioned 
smiles, and once downright laughter in a country 
church." The clergyman for whom he preached 
told Thoresby in after years that he never saw the 
like, for Saxton, not approving of the laughter, 
threatened to make all cry, and cry they did before 
he ended. What John Harrison thought of him 
and of his preaching may be learned from a letter 
of Harrison's to Mr Todd, wherein is reference to 
" the pretended doting Vicar, who fills his sermons 
with cavaliers, and proving Joseph's mistress to be 
a Eoyalist and himself a Koundhead" We may 
from this, also, readily comprehend how he gained 
the character given of< him in Walker's Sufferings 
of the Parochial Clergy, — " an enthusiastic incen- 
diary . . memorable for nothing but Ignorance, 



125 



Scurrility, and stirring up the people to Rebellion." 
But this evidently goes too far ; and the charge of 
ignorance is irreconcileable with the statement of 
the aforesaid old clergyman to Thoresby, that Peter 
Saxton "was really a learned and studious man, 
and being a great Hebrician, constantly carried the 
Hebrew Bible with him into the pulpit." Yet there 
is reason to believe that some of Puritan party 
themselves had only a qualified admiration for their 
new minister. Four months after he entered upon 
his duties, John Dawson, Francis Allanson, John 
Thoresby and Martin Isles — all of whom held the 
office of Alderman, and all of them leading men 
among the Parliamentarian party in Leeds — applied 
to Elkanah Wales of Pudsey, a Puritan Minister 
of more moderate character. "We understand," 
they wrote to him, " by Mr. Todd that some hopes 
there is of prevailinge with you to come to Leeds 
as a helper in the ministry." Wales would not 
leave Pudsey, but he frequently preached in Leeds 
at a "monthly lecture;'' and it is not without 
significance that in the list of " Faithful and Pain- 
ful Ministers" enumerated in the preface to the 
two sermons by Richard Garbut, there are mentioned 



126 

Cooke, Garbut, Kobinson, Styles, Wales and Tod, 
but not Saxton. The vicar by right, Henry Eobin- 
son, found refuge at Methley Hall, or where else 
he could. Lady Hutton and Lady Savile of Hutton- 
Pagnel were two of his protectors. Lady Savile 
once offered him a present of money, which he 
declined that it might be given to some one more 
in need. At length he was imprisoned, first at 
Middleham and then at the castle of Cawood. 
Cawood Castle had become dilapidated, and a falling 
stone broke our Vicar's arm. His wife, then near 
giving birth to a child, seized the opportunity to 
press for her husband's release. It is told in 
Sufferings of the Parochial Clergy that she asked 
the Puritan authorities what her husband had done ? 
They answered to the effect that he was a learned, 
godly man of a blameless life, and therefore his 
example did them a great deal of dis-service. " Nay 
then," said our Vicar's spirited wife, " God deliver 
us from you all." She succeeded in her application ; 
but once during these troubles she bore a child 
which her husband never saw, though it lived a year 
and a half. 

Thoresby mentions brasses which had been " bar- 



127 

barously torn off'' certain old monuments in our 
Parish Church, and at least some of this barbarity- 
is referable to the times of which I now speak. But 
beyond this, I have no means of ascertaining whether 
any or what damage was done to the church, either 
licentiously, or under the orders issued by Parlia- 
ment concerning churches in general. The inscrip- 
tion cut in one old marble tombstone to record the 
interment of Eichard Garbut is unfavourable testi- 
mony as to the care with which our monuments 
had, or rather had not, been treated before the war 
began. 

The year 1647 saw King Charles the First again 
in Leeds. He was brought here the first time 
when a child, to avoid the Plague in York; he was 
brought the second time, a prisoner, perhaps to 
avoid the loyalty of that city and its surrounding 
district. The Parliamentary Commissioners who 
received the King at Newcastle from the Scotch 
(to whom he had committed himself), and set out 
with him at the end of January for Holmby, in 
Northamptonshire, were troubled at the attention 
shown to the King during their journey. Three of 
them — Philip, Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery; 



128 



Basil, Earl of Denbigh; and Edward, Lord Montague, 
wrote thus from Leeds on the 7th of February: — 
"The King came to Eipon on Saturday night last 
where he rested upon the Lord's Day. A little 
before dinner many diseased persons came bringing 
with them ribbons and gold, and were only touched 
without any ceremony. We are now at Leeds, 
where hundreds attend in the same manner; and 
for that it may be of very dangerous consequence 
to his majesty's person and safety, and otherwise 
inconvenient we have agreed to publish a Declara- 
tion." The Declaration was, — "Whereas divers 
people do daily resort unto the court, under pretence 
of having the Evil; and whereas many of them 
are in truth infected with other dangerous diseases, 
and are therefore altogether unfit to come into the 
presence of his majesty; these are therefore strictly 
to require and charge all persons whatsoever, which 
are diseased, not to presume hereafter to repair unto 
the court, wheresoever it be, upon pain of being 
punished severely for their intrusion; and we do 
further require all sheriffs, mayors, bailiffs, consta- 
bles and other officers to see this our order published. 
Dated at Leeds the 9th of February, 1646." (Old 



129 



Style.) "By Command of the Commissioners 
appointed by both houses of Parliament to attend 
the King's person at Holdenby. Daniel Earle, 
Secretary to the Commissioners." Charles the First 
was confined at Eed Hall, which is still noted for 
"the King's Chamber." Thomas Metcalf was living 
at the time when his house was thus used for a 
purpose which he little foresaw at the building of 
it ; but he died without issue on the 8th of August, 
1650. 

The Commissioners were instructed to return 
the name of any one whom they suffered to speak 
to the King; and one name returned may have 
been that of John Harrison. He could not make 
scrofula, otherwise King's Evil, a pretext for admis- 
sion, seeking the King's touch for a disease which 
he had not, as humbler Eoyalists may have done; 
but he did that which signally disproves the 
calumny of Sir William Savile, when he called 
John Harrison a "Roundhead and an enemy to the 
King." Obtaining leave to present the King with 
a tankard of ale, which looks as if Leeds ale were 
even then famous, he conveyed to the King a 
tankard full of gold coin. The laborious Thomas 

K 



130 



Wilson had this story from John Harrison's relative, 
the son of Vicar Kobinson, and he commendably 
preserved it in his own hand writing. 

There is another story, well known, but we are 
indebted for it also to Thomas Wilson, so I here 
give it in his own words : — " A woman servant of 
the Eed Hall would have had King Charles to 
have put on her Cloaths and made his. escape, 
letting him know she could conduct him out of the 
Garden Door into a Back Alley called Lands Lane 
at the Dark Night where she would secure him in 
a friend's House, till a fit opportunity to make his 
escape into France, but the King did not accept of 
her offer, putting himself into the Hands of his 
traiterous Keepers not suspecting their Villany 
would arrive so far as to cut off his Head. How- 
ever he gave the Woman Thanks for her Kindness, 
and gave her his Garter Blue Silk inscribed Honi 
soit qui mal y pense in Letters of Gold, and telling 
her if ever his son came to the Crown (if they did 
deprive him of Life) she might give it him with 
an Account how she came to it and he would receive 
her (for he said with Tears he was not able to 
return her anything for her kindness). At the 



131 



Kestoration she presented his Majesty King Charles 
Second and told him the Story how she came to it, 
the King asked her where she came from, she said 
Leeds in Yorkshire, he asked her if she had a 
Husband, she said Yes, he asked of what Business, 
she said a Bailiff, he said he shall be the Chief 
Bailiff in Yorkshire, which he was, and built Crosby 
House in Leeds, so called in the Head Eow in 
Leeds." King Charles the First left Leeds a prisoner 
and in less than two years he was beheaded. 

There was an intermission in the municipal 
government of the town under Charles the First's 
charter, the plague returns having been made to 
General Carter, the military governor; and an ex- 
amination of the list of Aldermen shows that the 
intermission lasted three years. The civil govern- 
ance recommenced with Eobert Brooke, James Moxon 
and William Marshall, of the Upper-house, Moor 
Allerton, perhaps the William Marshall, junior, who 
had a share in the manor purchase. The next 
chief Alderman was Bichard Milner, ancestor of him 
who gave us Queen Anne's statue, and of the present 
Milners of Nun-Appleton. In his year we had a 
new vicar. Peter Saxton died on the 1st of October, 



132 

1651. His widow died in the February following; and 
before his own death his daughter, too, had died in 
Leeds. Her name was Silence. She is said to have 
been " a learned woman and a doctress." She found 
a husband, notwithstanding — Captain Samuel Pool, 
who married her in New England. 

There was some delay before the appointment of 
anew vicar in the year 1652. Perhaps the existing 
claim of Henry Eobinson was in some way con- 
sidered. Or perhaps the delay was connected with a 
proposal made in 1650 to divide the parish of Leeds, 
by constituting St. John's, Hunslet, Holbeck and 
Beeston each a distinct parish. Farnley, Armley 
Wortley and Bramley were to form one also, and 
Allerton with Headingley another. St. John's parish, 
was to have included Woodhouse Carr, Busling- 
thorpe, Burmandtofts, Mabgate, Quarry Hill, Park 
Lane and Little Woodhouse. The plan was not 
carried out. 

The new vicar, William Styles, M.A., was a very 
different sort of man from Peter Saxton. Born at 
Doncaster, and educated at Trinity College, Cam- 
bridge, he became Vicar of Ledsham; and after- 
wards, in 1624, Vicar of Pontefract on the King's 



133 

presentation. He was the subject of an ecclesiastical 
prosecution for baptizing a child without signing it 
with the cross ; but Alexander Cooke was his medi- 
ator with the Archbishop, and the prosecution was 
withdrawn. But how far soever a Puritan in his 
theological views, he was loyal to his King. He 
succeeded Andrew Marvel at Hull about the com- 
mencement of the war, but he refused to take the 
engagement required by Parliament in January, 
1650, — "I do declare and promise that I will be 
true and faithful to the Commonwealth of England, as 
the same is now established, without a King or House 
of Lords." President Bradshaw therefore wrote to 
Colonel Salmon, Deputy-Governor of Hull, to turn 
him by force out of the Church and to secure his 
person. The intercession of his parishioners could 
only obtain a respite until the end of March. Styles 
continued firm, and he was compelled to leave. 
After a year in London he returned to Yorkshire and 
became our Vicar. It is a further testimony to his 
loyalty, that his appointment here was freely con- 
sented to by Henry Eobinson, who, when left at 
liberty, took the rectory of Swillington, presented to 
him, according to Thoresby's account in 1649, by the 



134 

Honourable Conyers Darcy afterward Earl of Hoi- 
derness. Vicar Styles met at Leeds, says Thoresby, 
u with a kind Keception, and was highly honoured 
by the Magistrates and People, for his excellent 
practical Preaching, I have some of his sermons 
in M.S./' he adds, " and have seen several Volumes 
writ by the Aldermen and others his devout 
Hearers." 

Eichard Milner was succeeded as chief Alderman 
by John Thwaites, whose year of office was signalized 
by the return of a Leeds member to Parliament ; in 
accordance with an article of the Government of the 
Commonwealth which was formally read at Oliver 
Cromwell's installation as Lord Protector, on the 1 6th 
of December, 1653. Adam Baynes of Knowsthorp, 
Captain in the Parliamentary Army and influential 
with General Lambert, had credit given for causing 
Leeds to be made a Parliamentary borough, and 
Leeds accepted of his services. Writs for the elections 
were issued on the 1st of June, 1654; and Dr. 
Whitaker has published a curious letter concerning 
the Leeds election, dated the 14th of July, from one 
John Walker to the "Worshipful John Thwaites, 
Alderman/ 5 The writer said,—" I have a distemper 



135 



upon me that I cannot stire out of doors. . . My 
vote is for Captain Baynes to be our burgesse." He 
had been credibly informed that Captain Baynes had 
"procured this town this honour," and he therefore 
thought it "unthankful to give that coat of honour 
to another to wear." And, said the acute man of 
Leeds, Captain Baynes "is in a present capacity 
to doe us good," being ready trained to the work ; 
and in case of anyone not thus efficient, before 
he had learned his duty "the Parliament might 
be ended, and consequently the town frustrated 
of their hopes/' And he further argued for the 
Knowsthorp candidate, "Wee all know Lieutenant 
General Lambert is his great patron! and he 
strikes with great hammer." On his own part 
Captain Baynes was not idle. He wrote to his 
"honoured friends Alderman Thwaites, Mr. John 
Dawson and Mr. William Marshall," urging them to 
defeat an attempt by the High Sheriff to fix the day 
of election. On the 18th of July, 1654, Captain 
Adam Baynes, M.P. for Leeds, wrote a letter of thanks 
to "my honoured friend Mr. Alderman Thwaytes' 
and the rest of my good friends in the precincts of 
Leedes." He made " bold to hint" that they should 



136 

not lose time in preparing their commands for him 
against the meeting of Parliament, and he wound up 
with excellent advice against internal quarrels, 
quoting the proverb about " a house divided." " And 
in all your consultations," said he, "let me beg of 
you to endeavour the promotion of the clothing 
trade, which you know under God is the greatest 
meanes of most of your well-beings." The com- 
mands so courteously invited were not of much 
consequence, for on the 22nd of January following 
Cromwell dissolved the Parliament without its 
having fassed an Act. 

It was the 10th of July, 1656, before writs were 
issued for another election; but Adam Baynes was 
again chosen. And it appears that he was acceptable 
to Cromwell and his Council ; for he was not among 
those who signed a Eemonstrance against their 
exclusion by the Council on the plea that they were 
not, as required by the 17th article of Government, 
" of known integrity, fearing God and of good con- 
versation." Four of the six members for the West 
Eiding were less fortunate — Colonel Henry Tempest, 
Henry Arthington, John Stanhope and Francis 
Thorp. The other two, Lord Lambert and Captain 






137 

Edward Gill, were allowed to sit. This Parliament 
met on the 17th of September, 1656, and it was 
dissolved on the 4th of February, 1658. In the next 
Parliament, called by Eichard Cromwell after his 
father's death, Leeds had no place; but Appleby, 
not among the boroughs who contributed to Oliver's 
Parliaments, returned two members to Eichard's and 
one of the two was Adam Baines. Was he our 
ex-Member? and if so, what is the explanation? 
There was no Adam Baines, thus spelled, in the 
Parliaments in which Adam Baynes sat for Leeds. 

On the 29th of October, 1656, soon after the 
second Leeds election, John Harrison died at the age 
of seventy-seven. He had for years been ailing, and 
it says much for his constitution that with his state 
of health and his troubles combined he had lasted 
so long. In a letter written in 1651 he said, — "I 
am upon the point of 72 years of age, and therewith 
weakened with so many infirmities, as I am indeed 
bed-rid, and have been little better these twelve 
years." This agrees with the statement that he was 
ill in bed when so roughly compelled to furnish a 
horse to the Eoyalists. His still worse treatment by 
the Parliamentarians when they gained the upper 



138 



hand is remarkable. It might have been supposed 
that an aged, ailing man, who had studiously kept 
aloof from the war ; who had interceded successfully 
for the suspended Minister of St. John's, thereby 
incurring the displeasure of some who were opposed 
to the Puritans ; who could allude, as in the letter 
above quoted, to the bitterness with which, since the 
horse affair, he had been prosecuted by some 
clothiers averse from the government of the Common- 
wealth ; and who, with all this, had been so great a 
benefactor to the town, would have had little to fear 
from the victorious party, Eoyalist though he were. 
Yet, under the plea that he had supplied horses 
to the Kings army, John Harrison's estate was 
heavily sequestrated. His efforts to get the seques- 
tration reversed were unavailing, though Sir Thomas 
Fairfax wrote in his behalf, and though he earnestly 
appealed against a sentence which extended beyond 
himself to " the poor, the school and the highways." 
He begged Baron Thorpe, the principal arbiter in the 
case, to rescue " these three distressed and wounded 
supplicants out of the clutches of cormorants, two 
whereof," said he, "have suffered very nigh 10001. 
damage in these last seven years, and must suffer 



13b 

(if not prevented) above 1000L in the next sever, 
years, and so on infinitum ; and for the third, they 
have not received according to the donor's gift one 
farthing in all that time." It is noticeable that he 
wished Baron Thorpe to allow to wait upon him 
Mr. Arthington, Mr. Tempest and Mr. Stanhope, the 
names of the three members afterward elected for 
the West-Eiding and, along with Thorp himself, 
denied their seats in the House of Commons by 
Cromwell's Council. 

On the attainment of power by a new party in the 
town there seems to have been contention over the 
local trusts, and a want of unanimity among Harri- 
son's opponents themselves ; for in one of his letters to 
Baron Thorpe he wrote, — " Your lordship was pleased 
upon the jarrings betwixt Mr. Hes, Baynes and Allan- 
son, to say to Mr. Allanson, I see no way to make 
peace but to set Mr. Harrison at liberty to rule you 
all." Without more knowledge than I possess of the 
local squabbles of the time, it is impossible to com- 
prehend fully the correspondence published by Dr. 
Whitaker. Possibly, as in the case of the Vicar his 
nephew, the reputation of so exemplary a Church- 
man and Royalist as John Harrison may have been 



140 



felt inconvenient and damaging by the Puritan and 
Commonwealth party. To judge from Harrison's 
statements, they spared no pains to depreciate him, 
and showed little scruple in their allegations. He 
was said to be " an obstructor of the common good 
at Leedes, and in particular of the school;" "an 
enemy to godly ministers ;" and he was accused 
of having falsified his trust " in selling the school 
lands," of having had " secret meetings of Papists 
and malignants," of refusing to "choose able men 
for feoffees," in short, of being a " delinquent" or 
there were " none in the country." But what more 
than all troubled Harrison, it was said that he had 
"built the church for superstitious merits." In 
his will, dated the 27th of April, 1653, he expressly 
refutes this charge of having been influenced in 
his charity by Eoman Catholic views on the subject 
of good works ; and a prayer dictated by him not 
long before his death, directly, as well as indirectly, 
repudiates " that Popish sin of superstitious merits." 
He prayed, — " Lord forgive the inventors and broach- 
ers of that injurious scandal, as also the founder 
of the oratory for undertaking so unusual (tho' 
needful) a work, being a weak, sinful, unworthy 
man." 



141 

The attack on John Harrison's general character 
and reputation itself shows how inconvenient that 
character was to his opponents; but in addition 
there was strong personal feeling in their enmity 
against him. Harrison's letters afford abundant 
proof of his power of sarcasm, and likely enough 
he was not always judicious in using it. Thomas 
Dixon, a correspondent who informed him of the 
course of his proceedings with Baron Thorpe, relates 
a conversation which he had with a Major Gill. 
" I told him/' wrote Dixon, " I hoped Mr. Harrison 
would soon be acquitted; then he told me there 
were some that had certified for Mr. Harrison, and 
since had privately certified against him, and that 
Baron Thorpe told him this, when and as he came 
from York Assizes. Then I told him there was a 
certificate wherein he was certified to prosecute 
against Mr. Harrison, because he was chosen Alder- 
man by the well-affected. And after Mr. Harrison 
had been acquitted at a full board of twelve, they 
had brought him to a board of four, where he was 
adjudged, he did not deny the contents of the 
certificate, but told me that when Mr. Harrison was 
elected Alderman, he, with some others being there, 



142 



Mr. Harrison asked what they had to do there, 
upon that Major Gill took it so ill that after he 
thought upon it, and as he himself told me, if 
Mr. Harrison had not been Alderman he had never 
been sequestred; with something else to the same 
purpose." This is not so comprehensible as it 
might have been, but it shows that on one occasion 
Harrison made enemies by a free use of his tongue ; 
and the petty expedients of his enemies to annoy 
him testify that their enmity was largely personal 
in character, and not entirely a matter of principle. 
Harrison prevailed on Baron Thorpe to visit 
Leeds and see for himself how the municipal 
authorities discharged their trust; but it seems 
that Harrison got nothing thereby but mortifica- 
tion. First, he relates, the Baron promised to come 
on a Wednesday, " that being our doale day," and 
to come unexpectedly that he might take "the 
Aldermen napping," and inform himself "what poor 
went abroad." Instead of doing so he made his 
intention known, so that "the Aldermen had three 
days time to regulate the poor;" and they met the 
Baron in their robes. Harrison defended himself 
from the charges made against him ; " and yet," 



143 



he afterward complained in his letter to the Baron 
"merely upon naming Mr. Todd, upon the bye. 
your lordship was pleased to suffer my adversaries 
to bait me like a bear, without the least reproof." 
He then tells how he was thereby confused, and 
feared to offend by calling " for a quart of wine to 
bid you welcome;'' how his adversaries, seeing this, 
and to discourage him more, boldly asked the Baron, 
" What wine will you drink ? white, claret, or sack ?" 
The Baron's choice is unrecorded; but after his 
departure they who called for the wine ordered the 
bill to be sent to Harrison for payment. As it 
amounted to thirty-five shillings, the Baron had not 
been left to drink alone. This was enough to vex 
a saint ; but it was outdone by another bit of spite 
which Harrison thus recounted in the same letter to 
Baron Thorpe : — " Being informed the Aldermen 
had taken from me above two parts of my pew in 
the church, which though you then seemed to dis- 
like, yet afterwards (as I before writt to you) it 
pleased you to say to Mr. lies, that if I might 
enjoy that part of my pew left me for my family, 
and liberty to sit among the Aldermen myself, it 
was sufficient; and surely, my lord," he continued 



144 



*in a strain of well-justified satire, "this was an high 
favour from your lordship, that the founder of that 
pew and all the rest likewise, might have liberty- 
granted to sit with the right worshipful Alderman 
and his worshipful brethren, durante bene placito & 
se bene gerente, and verily this act of grace cannot 
but be a great inducement to encourage others 
hereafter to build churches, three and threefold." 

Harrisons appeals were in vain. "Wednesday 
last," Thomas Dixon wrote to him in June, 1651, 
"the expected day of your hearing and adjuging, 
proved, through the wilfulness of Baron Thorpe, the 
day of your adversity : never did cause so honest, 
so well prepared, and so well managed prove so 
unfortunate. But indeed it is no wonder to those 
who saw it heard, since wilfulness or rather malice 
was the blind guide of that one in power. . . 
Here they stuck a great while, and baron Thorpe 
did so squeeze it, and grind it, that a counsellor 
sitting by (I know him not) whispered me in the 
ear, I perceive much malice." 

It must have been especially provoking to Harrison 
that his very charities were the source of his greatest 
annoyances. He considered that the masters of the 



145 

Grammar School took for themselves monies which ■ 
should have gone to the highways; and he did not 
spare the objects of his complaint. " That subtil 
Ziba," he calls Joshua Pullen, who had succeeded 
his brother Samuel as Head-Master in 1630. In 
1651 Joshua Pullen was in turn succeeded by John 
Garnett, and to him Harrison wrote in these 
terms, — " Sir, though you be no fighter except 
with children, yet you may make good use of th e 
baptists advice, and be content with your wages, 
doing no man wrong, much less the highways lest 
you deter superstitious fools from bequeathing too 
much hereafter to that use." Here, again, Harrison 
hits at the charge of trusting in his good works ; 
and he then proceeds to another, — "Though I be 
charged with breach of trust, yet not only the high- 
ways, but the poor and school likewise shall find 
me stick as close to them as the skin to their 
enemies' brows." 

Again, Harrison may well have been annoyed at the 
result of his expenditure in St. John's. Devoted to 
the constitution and order of the Church of England, 
he was opposed alike to the Presbyterians and to 
the Church of P^ome, repeatedly showing how the 

L 



146 



two extremes met. Among his sayings are these, — 
"The same power the Papists give to general councils, 
the Presbyters give to a national assembly; the 
Papists condemn our books of Canons and Com- 
mon Prayer, so doth the Presbyterian; the Pope 
writ to the Catholics in England not to take the 
oath of supremacy, so did the Scotch Presbyterians 
to the Irish Protestants." "We may conceive, then, 
his irritation at Mr. Todd's nonconformity in regard 
to the Church of England, and conformity with the 
ordinances of that Parliament which abolished 
episcopacy and directed the election of " elders." 
His estimate of Mr. Todd's ingratitude and Puritan- 
ism combined drew forth the following, — " The 
time was when you called me patron, and remem- 
bered me in your prayers, public and private, but now 
patrons are out of date, and so may churches be 
tithe-barns. To pray for any in public is Popish 
and Prelatic ; the time was when I suffered for you 
under the royal party more than you will suffer for 
me under the Parliament, but (Oh ! the times) my 
suffering for you is made an apology to deter you 
from so much as visiting me, being under the 
hatches, a poor conclusion founded upon weak 



147 



premises ; but the time was when all I could do for 
you was too little, and now the least done for me is 
too much . . Have you not already (against your 
promise to the Bishop) encroached against the 
metropolitan (if I may so call it) or mother 
church? Have you not chosen elders (creatures 
Gcd never thought upon) for Woodhouse, Park 
Lane, Quarry Hill, Marsh Lane, Hill House Bank, 
Knostrop, Head Eow, &c/' 

Harrison's opinion of the party dominant during 
the latter portion of his life is also made known 
to us by other of his sayings : — " Of old time it 
was said, Go and sell all that thou hast and give to 
the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven ; 
now it is, seem holy on the Sabbath, and thou art 
in heaven already, hypocrisy is almost, general ; 
now every cobler must have a voice in matters of 
faith ; none can serve two masters saith the Scrip- 
ture, but some can serve three masters — Ambition, 
Mammon, and God as they pretend." If sometimes 
he were too severe and indiscriminate it is not to 
be wondered at, considering the times in which he 
lived, and the mortification which he had to endure. 
And I think that Dr. Whitaker gives more weight 



148 



than it deserves to a letter signed Eoger Portington, 
complaining of Harrison's harshness in regard to 
liabilities which Portington was unable to meet. 
From the date of the letter, 13th May, 1652, it 
was written when Harrison had suffered by the 
sequestration upon his estate, and had need enough 
to press for any debt due to him. The probability 
is that he foreclosed as mortgagee, or something 
equivalent to it. His will mentions "a house 
in Kirkgate, wherein Eichard Wright and his 
assignees now dwell, with one garden and appur- 
tenances, which I purchased from Eoger Portington." 
Eobert Hitch, of Guiseley, Clerk ; Benjamin Wade, 
of New Grange, gentleman; and Eichard Lodge, 
of Leeds, merchant, were John Harrison's execu- 
tors. His will confirmed the trusts which he had 
by deed created, and otherwise disposed of his 
remaining property. I can tell nothing about his 
funeral ; but as it passed from his mansion in Brig- 
gate, by the " stately Cross" and through New Kirk- 
gate to the Church which he had built and en- 
dowed, surely his very adversaries tried to think 
of him with charity. Whether Mr. Todd, alone 
or in conjunction with Vicar Styles, did his office 



149 

at the funeral, I cannot tell; but we may hope 
that however convinced that he had himself chosen 
a right course, he at least regretted the estrange- 
ment from his old patron. The position of his 
tomb in St. John's Church is evidence that respect 
was paid to Harrison's memory as its founder ; 
and with a quotation from his dictated prayer, con- 
cerning the church which he had founded, I con- 
clude this notice of John Harrison. " And lastly, 
tho' by reason of my many sins and aberrations, I 
be unworthy to beg anything at thy hand, yet I 
implore thee in all meekness of spirit to accompany 
with thy blessing the preaching of thy word, and 
the administration of thy sacraments, together with 
such ordinances and services as hereafter shall be 
performed therein according to the prescript of thy 
word, and grant that Archippus minister there, and 
Epaphras his fellow servant, and their successors 
may take heed to their ministry, that they fulfil 
it sincerely; not by maintaining unwarrantable 
opinions, tending to factions, nor loving pre-emi- 
nence like Diotrephes, but by teaching the truth, 
in purity and unity of spirit, with all humility 
like the Great Doctor of the Gentiles/' 



150 



I have little more to tell of Leeds before the 
Eestoration. A letter written by John Clayton, 
Kecorder of Leeds, to John Thoresby the younger, 
proves that the disputes over our local Trusts were 
not ended by the death of Harrison. It speaks of 
the return home of "your neighbours and friends," 
bringing with them "a commission for pious 
uses. . . wherein such persons as are empowered 
will act/' under the Great Seal. Thomas Wood- 
rove, the letter further informed Thoresby, "is 
now fully restored to that trust solely and ab- 
solutely settled upon him, and if that other busy, 
restless man but offer to interrupt in the least, a 
sergeant at arms will be sent for him." It also gave 
advice and caution in these terms, — " Doe what 
you doe deliberately, not rashly, and if angry lett 
as favourable and respective hand as is conveni- 
ent towards your owne merchants and factor in- 
habitants. This will arme against strangers who 
took and take advantage of divisions amongst your- 
selves." John Clayton, the writer of this letter, 
was of some note in his day, and author of 
" Topicks of the Law Eeports and Pleas of Assizes 
at Yorke ;" but he was a hot partisan on the Com- 



151 



monwealth side, if, as I suppose, he is the same 
with Mr. Clayton, Chairman of Sessions, spoken 
of in Sufferings of the Parochial Clergy. It is 
there told that in a charge to the Grand Jury 
Mr. Clayton bid them "take notice of two ladies, 
who received the Malignant, Vagabond, Cavalier 
Ministers into their houses." Having, after this, 
to call on Lady Savile, thus alluded to along with 
Lady Hutton, she let him wait awhile and then 
saluted him, — " Is it you Mr. Clayton that have 
waited here so long ? I thought it to have been some 
Malignant, Vagabond, Cavalier Minister." His let- 
ter to John Thoresby, with its postcript, — " Com- 
mend me to Mr. Todd and Garnett," shows with 
whom he was intimate in Leeds. The letter is 
dated 16 Feb. 1657-8, and it was therefore written 
twelve days after the dissolution of the last of 
the two Parliaments in which Adam Baynes repre- 
sented Leeds. Eeferring to it our Eecorder said, — 
" Be vigilant and circumspect, and feare not but all 
will be well tho' at present the aspect of affairs 
are (or at least seem to bee) very much clouded 
since the dessolucion of the Parliament." He ap- 
pears to have approved of another measure taken 



152 

about the same time, termed the "purgation of the 
army ;" and in a second postcript he says, " C. B. 
is outed from the Committee of the army, and I 
heare what else hee was engaged in." So C. B., or 
Captain Baynes, was out of favour. 

John Thoresby the younger, father of our anti- 
quary and formerly an officer under Fairfax, wrote 
in his reply, that the friends whose return was 
spoken of by the Kecorder had arrived safe home 
the night before. Thomas Woodrove "not a little 
thankful for what is done for him." And Thomas 
Woodrove, he further tells, "this morning delivered 
the order to Hurst, who answered this only con- 
cerned himselfe, and w r ould not hinder Cawood 
from carrying some merchants letters, and for his 
owne he would carry and send them hym-selfe, 
and that rather than he should be baffled herein 
he would up to London and spend £100 and make 
his enemies appear to be lyers; but his frothy 
words are not worth the writing. I believe he dares 
not act, if he doe we shall give notice." So this 
Hurst was the busy, restless man, threatened with 
a sergeant-at-arms. 

"The purgation of the army relishes with the 



153 



most stable and consciencious amongst us," said John 
Thoresby, meaning, I suppose, by the most stable and 
conscientious, the Leeds Cronrwellians. - For I doubt 
not that in Leeds there were representatives of all 
the political sections of the day, and that the news 
of Cromwell's death at Whitehall, on the 3rd of 
September, 1658, was received here with a variety 
of feeling. Neither do I doubt that the Koyalist 
reaction made headway in Leeds, when some were 
disappointed in their hopes, perhaps Utopian, from the 
Commonwealth, and others, like' Fairfax, regretted the 
excesses of a revolution which they had helped into 
motion but were powerless to check. Vicar Styles 
publicly and courageously prayed for the King in 
exile, and it deserves notice that our Cromwellian 
Recorder made no mention of Styles when he 
desired to be commended to Todd and Garnet. It 
is a further sign of the reaction which had set 
in that on the death of Vicar Styles, on the 16th 
of March, 1660, Henry Eobinson was invited to 
return to his charge; and that on his deciding to 
remain at Swillington Rectory the man selected for 
vicar was John Lake — a staunch Churchman and 
Royalist, afterward the Bishop of Chichester known 



154 



in history as one of the seven committed to the 
Tower, yet remaining, a non-juror, faithful to the 
second James. He became Vicar of Leeds at the 
age of thirty-five, having been baptized at Halifax 
on the 5th of December, 1624. He was not allowed 
to enter on his duties peacefully. There was a 
party in favour of a Mr. Bowles, of York, and as 
some of the younger among them went so far as to 
bar the church doors against Lake, on his Induction, 
soldiers were employed to put down this forcible 
opposition. The new Vicar himself showed more 
moderation than did his opponents ; for he retained 
as lecturer Christopher Nesse, who had filled that 
office under Vicar Styles since 1656, and who held 
opinions more in accordance with Mr. Todd's than 
with those of Vicar Styles's successor. 

To fill up my list of our chief Aldermen under 
Charles the First's charter, John Thwayts was fol- 
lowed by Martin lies, already mentioned in the 
correspondence which I have quoted. Henry Eound- 
hill and Marmaduke Hicke of Boar Lane followed, 
and then Francis Allanson for the second time. 
Next, William Fenton was Alderman for two years 
together, which brings us down to Michaelmas, 1659. 



155 

Paul Thoresby, brother to him who was killed at 
Wakefield, held the office at the Eestoration of 
Charles the Second. He for whom, more than all 
the rest, the family name is held in remembrance 
was then an infant under two years old. For on 
the 16th of August, 1658, about a fortnight before 
the death of Cromwell, not two years after the death 
of John Harrison, was born our Antiquary, the great 
Ealph Thoeesby. 



I thought when I began my story to bring it down 
to my own times, but age teaches modesty as well as 
wisdom. Perchance an old man's gossip would 
outlast the patience of its readers, though his days 
were prolonged until the completion of his adopted 
task. If life and health permit, I am willing 
to go on. For the present I await encouragement 
from — can a man say his fellows when he has 
outlived them all ? — Yes ! to the last I will say to 
Leeds, my fellow-townsfolk. 



NOTES. 



Page 28.— "Roger, of North-Hall, Leeds," ike. 

Rogerus de Ledes, Abbot of Kirkstall in 1349, was probably of the 
same family. 

Page 29. — ' ' in 1321 Earl Thomas was beheaded at Pomfret as a 
traitor. " 

The date is here given according to the style which had come into 
general use in the fourteenth century, commencing the year on the 
25th of March. According to the New Style, in use from the 1st of 
January, 1752, Thomas of Lancaster was beheaded in March, 1322. 
Robert Bruce defeated the English army at Byland on St. Luke's 
day, or the 18th of October, in the same year. 

Page 30. Did Henry the Fourth, by sending Richard the Second to 
Leeds after his deposition, enable us to boast of a royal visit during the 
Middle Ages t 

John Hardyng's quaint and oft-quoted stanza, our foundation for the 
statement that Richard the Second was confined here, commences hi s 
199th chapter, which is headed, — "How the Kyng Henry remeued 
Kyng Richard from place to place by night, in preuey wise ;" &c. 
Hardyng was twenty-one years old at the time of Richard the Second's 
deposition, and bemg a north- countryman he may be supposed to have 
had some personal knowledge of the several Yorkshire towns named : — 

" The Kyng the sent King Richard to Ledis, 

Theie to be kepte surly in previtee, 
Fro thes after to Pykeryng wet he nedes, 

And to Knauesburgh after led was he, 
But to Pountfrete last where he did die." 

Thus, it is a very plausible supposition that Hardyng's Ledis was not 
our Kentish rival in historical interest, but the Leeds of that county in 
which the other three towns are situated. I have assumed this 
without question. Dr. Whitaker declared it a certainty, but in truth 



158 



it is more likely that Leeds Castle in Kent was the place of Richard's 
imprisonment than Jeremiah Odman is in a hurry to acknowledge. 
" The Chronicle of the Betrayal and Death of Richard the Second, 
King of England," published by the English Historical Society, tells 
how Richard was sent from London to Gravesend on the Vigil of All 
Saints, the 31st of October, 1399. This places him in the neighbour- 
hood of Leeds in Kent, whither Polydore Virgil and Peter de Ickham 
say that he was taken. Hall says so too, but most likely upon the 
authority of Polydore, Hollingshed in his turn making the same state- 
ment on the authority of Hall. Further, it is useless to deny that 
from our own Leeds to Pomfret by way of Pickering and Knares- 
borough is an extraordinarily round-about road ; but no such difficulty 
troubles the supposition that Richard was brought by sea from Kent to 
the coast of Yorkshire, and that he was then taken to Pickering, 
Knaresborough and Pomfret. 

Page 34. — "a Norman 'building which had superseded the still older 
church of Doomsday Booh. 

Apart from the discovered fragments, it is improbable that the 
church mentioned in Doomsday Book continued until , the reign of 
Edward the Third. Without the slight evidence which the frag- 
ments furnish, it is a reasonable conjecture that after the building of 
Adel church, and of the more imposing though less ornamented Abbey 
church at Kirkstall, a new church was thought necessary for Leeds 
which, during the twelfth century, so far outgrew its fourteen plough 
estate of the Doomsday period as may be inferred from the details of 
Paganel's charter. But whether Leeds was indebted for its new 
church to a De Laci, a Paganel, or to the Prior of Trinity, or by what 
other means the church was built, I leave to the guess or the discovery 
of others. 

Page 37. - Christmas Day, 1460; for news must then have arrived of tlie 
fight the day before,^ <£c. 

In adopting the date given by Hume, I fear that I have had more 
regard to convenience than to accuracy. The Duke of York arrived at 
Sandal Castle on Christmas Eve, and this may have misled our standard 
historian ; but the battle of Wakefield was not fought until the 30th of 
December. Hardyng's 237th chapter is headed,—" Howe the battail 
of Wakefield, when the North partie prevailed, was the fifth daye of 
Christmasse, and of the King his reigne the nine and thirty." 



159 



Page 44.— " King Henry the Eighth at Haslewood, in 1541," &c. 

Thoresby says 1548, the year after that in which Henry the Eighth 
died, and Dr. Whitaker has not noticed Thoresby's inadvertency. 

Page 49. " The Oven triumphed." 

By Indenture, dated 30th January, 1654, John Harrison and others 
conveyed five-ninths of the office of Baliwick of the Manor or Lordship 
of Leeds to trustees for the use of the Corporation, a alsoe of ye com' 
on Oven and Bakehouse," and of the fair and market tolls. The grant 
was subject to a Fee-farm rent of £7 2s. 7d., part of the rent for the 
whole Bailiwick amounting to £58 15s. 2d., and half a farthing. 

Page 49. — " Bussh ingth rop. " 

Dr. Whitaker demurs to Thoresby's derivation of the name Busling- 
thorp from the Saxon signifying ox or cow stalls, and says that if so 
derived the name would be spelled Busingthorp. The spelling of the 
Duchy Calendar in some measure answers to Dr. Whitaker's requirement. 

Page 56. —" the portion only that enriched Ralph Thoresby' s museum. 

How Thoresby would have prized and moralized over the Girdle of 
St. Bernard, which the Kirkstall Monks had pro parturientibus. But 
this, which he makes mention of in a note to the Vicar ia, does not 
appear in his catalogue. 

Page 78. — but in the next, 1620, the Moot-hall arose, to be adorned near 
a century later with the statue of 'another Queen Anne. 

Not the identical edifice. The Moot- Hall was rebuilt in 1710, before 
the erection of the statue. 

Page 79.- -but his work was done for him by John Harrison. 

Sir John Savile was to be Alderman, said the Charter, " from the 
making of these presents unto the Feast of St. Michael the Archangel 
next following after the date of these presents, and from that feast 
until one of the principal burgesses of the borough aforesaid in due 
manner shall have been elected, made and sworn to that office." The 
latter part of the clause was a provision against the office becoming 
vacant, perhaps also for an interval between the election and the 
swearing in. It occurs again in the direction for the annual elec- 
tion of an Alderman on Michaelmas Day. So John Harrison's deputy- 
ship dates from the 13th of July to the 29th of September, 1626, a 
period of little more than two months. 

Page 80. Five of the other half dozen were Aldermen of the new 
Corporation. 



160 



Thoresby calls them Aldermen, but two of the number, Benjamin 
Wade and Francis Jackson, were among the twenty Assistants nomi- 
nated in the Charter, not among the nine Principal Burgesses correspond- 
ing to the Aldermen of a later period. The first two of the nine, how- 
ever, Ralph HoptoD, Esq., and Seth Skelton, Gentleman, never filled 
the office of Chief Alderman, and it may be that they left the Corpo- 
ration altogether, Wade and Jackson succeeding them. This is 
probable, for the Charter directed that the Alderman should be chosen 
from the Principal Burgesses, and the first five successors of Sir John 
Savile were of the nine Principal Burgesses in the Charter named. 
Wade and Jackson follow, and after them the chief Aldermen were all 
of the aforesaid nine until the election of Ralph Crofts, Michaelmas, 
1641, who was among the Assistants named in the Charter. It is 
noticeable that of the Principal Burgesses, only Seth Skelton, John 
Harrison, John Hodgson and Samuel Casson are styled " Gentleman." 
Richard Sykes, Robert Benson, Thomas Metcalf and Joseph Hillary 
are not thus distinguished. Ralph Hopton, Esq., who heads the list, 
was of the Hoptons of Armley,and father of Sir Ingram Hopton, Kt., 
who was killed fighting for King Charles, near Horncastle in Lincoln- 
shire, in 1643. Perhaps Ralph Hopton's nomination had the honorary 
character of Sir John Savile's. 

Page 81. " Then came Richard Sykes ." 

It is recorded that in 1638 " The House of Correction was built by 
Richard Sykes, Alderman, and others, for a common Workhouse for 
the Poor." Both his terms of office as chief Alderman had then ex- 
pired. 

Page 86. — " His sermons were well studied/' &c. 

The account given of his preaching is borne out by the sermons 
published. So quaint as now to be amusing, divided and divided 
again until somewhat tedious, they are nevertheless indicative of 
talent, extensive reading and good sense. His citation of Chrysostom, 
Augustine, Basil and others, among the others, Plutarch, and the 
systematic arrangement of his discourses, explain the- complaint about 
their academical character. Outspoken and honest, forcible in language 
and illustration, Richard Garbut or Garbat, for his name is spelled 
both ways, displayed much discrimination. As a sample take the 
following extracts from his sermon against drunkenness, on the text 
— Count not thine handmaid a daughter of Belial. Defining a Daughter 



161 



of Belial or Child of the Devil as " in all like conformable wickedness 
and ungodliness so to resemble the Devil himself that for wickedness 
men may seem to be begot of no other than of the very wicked One, bred 
of his very Spawn, begot of his very Seed, bearing the very Image 
and Picture of the Father in the face/' he proceeded, — " Now, though 
all that in any great conformableness resemble for wickedness the very 
wicked one, may be said to be the very Children of that wicked one 
the Devil ; yet the Drunkard of all other (especially the true Drunkard 
indeed) is one even of his chopping Children, one of his very first-born 
ones, one of his white Sons, that he may stroke on the head as his best 
Darlings." But Garbut then went on to define a drunkard, distin- 
guishing between Ebriv.s, who in some exceptional instance became 
intoxicated, and Ehriosus, the habitual drunkard: — " Now it is the 
latter who is properly called the Child of the Devil, and not the 
f ormer ; as he who by a fall or other accident should get a great Coule in 
his Forehead, which should stay with him only for a while ; or as he 
who upon a sudden fit of the Convulsion should for a while writhe 
his Mouth awry : as neither of these could be said, because the one 
resembles him who naturally and constantly hath a great bunch of 
flesh grow in his Forehead, and the other him who naturally and 
constantly hath a wry mouth, to be upon this as 'twere their very 
children/' He further drew distinctions between drunkards them- 
selves. Besides the " thoroughly steept" there was the "lightly 
dipt," or "he that is not so full in the midst of the Clout as the 
former, but he is about the Clout ; Aye, perhaps in a little nook and 
out- corner of it . . . continually tipling and tipling, till he be (as 
they say) somewhat fine, somewhat brave, somewhat trpt, somewhat 
toucht, somewhat pratty, and many other such pratty Names, that the 
World calls these pratty Creatures by, rather than by the Name of 
Drunkards." Garbut's simile of "the clout" denotes general fami- 
liarity in his day with the practice of archery. 

Page 91.—" his i loveing frend Mr. Alderman at Leedes.' p 
Joseph Hillary, theD Alderman for the second time. 
Page 100. — A trench two yards broad," &c. 

Five hundred pounds had been expended on the defences of the 
town. 

Page 114. — " Much mv.rmure and lamentation, amongst the people." 
Of whom some would be ready to say to Cavalier and Roundhead, — 



M 



162 



"a plague on both your Houses." Subsequently Parliament was 
applied to for relief against losses sustained as the Journals of the 
House of Commons thus testify :— 22nd April, 1647. — " Ordered, That 
the Petition of the Poor People of Leeds and Bradford be read on 
Tuesday next."— 19th July, 1647. "The humble Petition of Paul Free- 
man, Robert Worrall, Richard Nimlim, Margaret Fletcher, Alice 
Freeman, of Leeds in Yorkshire, Clothiers, was this Day read ; and was, 
for Belief of their losses at Leeds, in burning their Houses and spoil of 
their Goods. Ordered, That the sum of Three Hundred Pounds be 
provided and raised out of the Estates of such concealed Delinquents 
in the County of Yorke, as are not sequestered, for and towards the 
Satisfaction of the losses of Paul Freeman, Robert Worral, Richard 
Nimlim, Margaret Fletcher, and Alice Freeman, of Leedes, Clothiers, in 
burning down their Houses, and spoiling of their Goods, at Leedes 
aforesaid : And that it be referred to the Committee of the County of 
Yorke, to examine the losses of the said respective persons, upon Oath, 
whether they do amount to so much or not ; and to pay unto them 
their Proportions of the said Three Hundred Pounds, according to their 
losses respectively. The Lords concurrence to be desired herein." 
On the 22nd it was ordered "That the sum of Twenty Pounds be 
paid by the Committee of Lords and Commons, for advance of monies 
at Haberdashers Hall, unto Paul Freeman, Robert Woodall, Richard 
Nimlim, Alice Freeman, widow, Margarett Fletcher, widow, poor people, 
that suffered great losses, by having their houses burnt in the County 
of Yorke, to help them to bear their Charges, in their return to their 
own Country. The Lords concurrence to be desired herein." 
Page 115. — "the only additional information in the Parish Register." 
Later on we have the following: — "Sixteen more in June (1643) 
under Captain Lascelles, Major Gifford, Sir George Went worth, 
Captain Thornton and the Earl of Newcastle. Twelve more in July, 
under Gen. King, Sir Ingram Hopton and Sir Wm. Widdrington. 26, 
soldiers buried in July and August, 1644. A soldier buried in the old 
school garth. Several soldiers, and Captain Cox from Newcastle, slain 
at Bradford, Feb. 1643-4." 

Page 123. — " an eccentric Puritan named Peter Saxton." 
Thoresby says " there goes under his name a Book intituled 
Christmas Cheere ; or profitable Notes of two Sermons preached the 25th of 
December, being commonly (how rightly let others judge) called Christmas- 



163 



Day, and upon the Day folloioing, commonly called St. Stephen's-Day. 
Lege, Judica, reconde, corrige, ignosce, cave. 8vo. Anno 1606." 

Page 125. — "John Dawson, Francis Allanson," &c. 

In the Commons' Journals, under date 16th February, 1645-6, is 
the following entry : — " The humble petition of the Clothiers, Makers 
of Broad Cloth, in the County of Yorlce, was this day read : And like- 
wise the humble petition of John Daioson, Francis Allison, and others, 
the Well-affected, within the Parish of Leedes. It is Ordered, That 
both these Petitions, together with the whole Matter of them, and the 
manner of procuring and getting Hands to the First Petition, be 
referred to the Examination and Consideration of the Committee of 
the Northern Association, where Sir Thomas Widdrington hath the 
Chair : Who are to hear the parties interested, and to report their 
opinions, upon the whole Matter, to the House." Some time elapsed 
before the Committee ended the work assigned to them, if the follow- 
ing entry on the 22nd of April, 1647, refer to the same petition, — 
" Ordered, That the Eeports from the Northern Committee, concerning 
the Petition of divers Inhabitants and Merchants of Leeds, be made on 
Tuesday next." 

Page 127. — <( to record the interment of Fdchard Garbut," &c. 

The inscription " Here lyeth Mr. Richard Garbut, late Lecturer of 
Leedes, March 7, 1630," was cut upon a marble slab bearing the date 
1464, with the brass effigies of John, son of Sir John Lang*ton of 
Famley Hall, and of his wife. There were also in Thoresby's time 
vacancies whence twelve escutcheons had been torn out. Thoresby 
mentions other three interments recorded on the same tombstone. He 
also tells of other old slabs which had been made to do double duty, 
the comparatively modern inscriptions being of later date than the one 
for Richard Garbut. 

Page 131. — " The civil governance recommenced," &c. 

I here follow Mr. Wardell whom I suppose to have the warrant of 
documents in the Town Clerk's office for the dates to his list of 
Aldermen under the first charter. Otherwise, I should have thought 
that the three years break ought to be placed a year earlier. As 
already stated, the last of our chief Aldermen before the outbreak of 
the civil war was Ralph Crofts. Next on the list is John Dawson, of 
Mill Hill, whose year of office dates from Michaelmas, 1642, to 
Michaelmas, 1643, He was, therefore, Alderman when Leeds was 



164 



taken by Fairfax, besieged by Goring, and regained by the Royalists 
after the battle of Adwalton Moor. It deserves notice that he was the 
first Alderman elected whose name had not been inserted in Charles 
the First's Charter, either for Principal Burgess or for Assistant ; and 
as Dawson and his next two successors, Francis Allanson and John 
Thoresby, both of Kirkgate (the latter being the grandfather of Ralph 
the Antiquary), became prominent among the Parliamentarians, it is a 
fair inference that whatever the strength of the Royalists in Leeds 
their opponents acquired a predominance in the town about the time 
when the war began. Nor of the later Aldermen under the first 
Charter was there one who had been named in it if I am right in 
supposing that William Marshall, Alderman in 1650 and 1651, was 
William Marshall, junr. ; for William Marshall the elder was one of 
the nominated Assistants. The military governance of General Carter 
must have soon cut short John Thoresby's term of authority, who, 
immediately following Francis Allanson, would be elected Alderman at 
Michaelmas, 1644. On the 12th of March, 1645, how much earlier I 
know not, Leeds was under General Carter's rule ; and without 
guidance in the matter, I should therefore have supposed Thoresby's 
Aldermanship at the end of the suspension of our civil government 
instead of at its beginning. 

Page 131. — Peter Saxton died on the 1st of October, 1651. 

This was nearly a month after the battle of Worcester, but I know 
of no mention of Leeds in connection with that event, except that in 
the Journals of the House of Commons there is the entry, on Friday, 
12th September, 1651, — " Mr. Henry Darley reports, from the Council 
of State, a letter from Major- General Harrison of the Ninth Day of 
the Seventh Month, from Leeds : Which was this day read." It 
referred to prisoners taken subsequently to the battle. 

Page 133. — li He succeeded Andrew Marvel at Hull" <&c. 

Who was drowned in crossing the Humber. Thoresby calls him 
"the famous Mr. Marvel," but his son of the same name is now more 
generally remembered. 

Page 134. — "John Thwaites, ivhose year of office was signalized by the 
return of a Leeds Member to Parliament. 

But if so there is an inaccuracy in the list of Aldermen as published, 
according to which his year of office ended at Michaelmas, 1653. 
Yet, if it did so end. how come the letters quoted relating to the 



165 



election to be addressed to him, and not to his successor, Alderman 
Isles ? 

Page 136. — "Adam Baynes was again chosen" 

Not unanimously. There was a double return —Adam Baynes and 
Francis Allanson ; but Baynes got the seat. 

Page 139.— "Mr. Arthingtm," &c. 

About the time when the letter spoken of was written, Henry 
Arthington of Artbington, Esq. ; Walter Stanhope, of Horsforth, 
gentleman ; his son and heir, John Stanhope, and Henry Thornton, 
of Horsforth, Yeoman, made an award, dated 16th June, 1651, for the 
settlement of a dispute over tax-paying between the three manors of 
Leeds-Town, Leeds-Kirkgate and Leeds-Mainriding. The award 
directed that "all Taxac'ons, layes and Assessments for Church, 
Bridges and the like/' and all other taxes should be paid as hereto- 
fore, " before the beginninge of the late warres," together with the 
monthly assessments for the army or Commonwealth. 

Page 150. — " a hot partisan on the Commonwealth side," &c. 

Yet John Clayton had been named Eecorder of Leeds in the Charter 
granted by King Charles. 



H. W. WALKER, PRINTER, BRIGGATE, LEEDS. 



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Old Leeds: 



[T8 BYEGONES AND CELEBRITIES. 



OLD LEEDS CROPPER. 




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